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Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series No. 31 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON 
WALKING 

A MEDICO-LITERARY STUDY 



BY 

DR. J. SADGER 

VIENNA 



TRANSLATED BY 

LOUISE BRINK 



NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON 

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COMPANY 

1920 



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CONTENTS 

Translator's Preface v 

Introduction vii 

Part I. Medical I 

Part II. Literary Section 45 

Conclusion and Resume 137 

Index 139^ 



iii 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

Psychoanalysis holds a key to the problem of sleep walking, 
which alone has been able to unlock the mysteries of its causes and 
its significance. This key is the principle of wish fulfilment, an 
interpretative principle which explains the mechanisms of the 
psyche and illuminates the mental content which underlies these. 
Sleep walking as a method of wish fulfilment evidently lies close 
to the dream life, which has become known through psychoanalysis. 
Most of us when we dream, according to the words of Protagoras, 
" lie still, and do not stir." In some persons there is however a spe- 
cial tendency to motor activity, in itself a symptomatic manifestation, 
which necessitates the carrying out of the dream wish through 
walking in the sleep. The existence of this fact, together with 
the evidence of an influence of the shining of the moon upon this 
tendency to sleep walking, give rise to certain questions of import- 
ance to medical pschology. The author of this book has pursued 
these questions in relation to cases which have come to him for 
psychoanalysis, in the investigation of actual records of sleep walk- 
ing given in literature and in the study of rare instances where 
it has been made the subject of a literary production or at least an 
episode in tale or drama. In each case the association with moon- 
light or some other light has been a distinct feature. 

The author's application of psychoanalysis to these problems 
has the directness and explicitness which we are accustomed to 
find in Freud's own writings. This is as true in the literary portion 
of the work as in the medical but it never intrudes to mar the 
intrinsic beauty of certain of the selections nor the force of the 
intuitive revelations which the writers of these preceding science 
have made in regard to sleep walking and walking in the moon- 
light. Sadger has skilfully utilized these revelations to convince us of 
the truth of the psychoanalytic discoveries and has used the latter 
only to make still more explicitly and scientifically clear the testi- 
mony of the poetic writers and to point out the applicability of their 
material to medical problems. The choice of this little understood 
and little studied subject and its skilful presentation on the part 
of the author, as well as the introduction to the reader of the literary 



VI TRANSLATORS PREFACE 

productions of which use has been made, give the book a peculiar 
interest and value. It is also of especial service in its brief but 
profoundly suggestive study of the psychic background of Shakes- 
peare's creative work as illustrated in the sleep walking of Lady 
Macbeth. The endeavor in the translation has been to make acces- 
sible to our English readers the clear and direct psychoanalysis of 
the author and the peculiar psychologic and literary value of the 
book. 



INTRODUCTION 1 

Sleep walking or night wandering, known also by its Latin name 
of noctambulism, is a well-known phenomenon. Somnambulism is 
not so good a term for it, since that signifies too many things. In 
sleep walking a person rises from his bed in the night, apparently 
asleep, walks around with closed or half opened eyes, but without 
perceiving anything, yet performs all sorts of apparently purpose- 
ful and often quite complicated actions and gives correct answers 
to questions, without afterward the least knowledge of what he has 
said or done. If this all happens at the very time and under the in- 
fluence of the full moon, it is spoken of as moon walking or being 
moonstruck. 

Under the influence of this heavenly body the moonstruck indi- 
vidual is actually enticed from his bed, often gazes fixedly at the 
moon, stands at the window or climbs out of it, " with the suref oot- 
edness of the sleep walker," climbs up upon the roof and walks 
about there or, without stumbling, goes into the open. In short, he 
carries out all sorts of complex actions. Only it would be dan- 
gerous to call the wanderer by name, for then he would not only 
waken where he was, but he would collapse frequently and fall 
headlong with fright if he found himself on a height. 

Besides there is absolute amnesia succeeding this. Upon per- 
sistent questioning there is an attempt to fill in the gaps in memory 
by confabulation, like the effort to explain posthypnotic action. 
Furthermore, it is asserted that a specially deep sleep always ushers 
in night wandering, that indeed the latter in general is only possible 
in this condition. It is more frequent with children up to puberty 
and throughout that period than with adults. At the same time the 
first outbreak of sleep walking occurs often at the first appearance 
of sexual maturity. According to a widespread folk belief sleep 
walking will cease in a girl when she becomes pregnant with her 
first child. 

It seems to me that practically no scientific treatment of this 

1 liber Nachtwandeln und Mondsucht. Eine medizinish-literarische 
Studie, von Dr. J. Sadger, Nervenarzt in Wien; Schriften zur angewandten 
Seelenkunde, Herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud, Sechzentes Heft, 
Leipzig und Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1914. 



Vlll INTRODUCTION 

problem exists. Modern psychiatry, so far as it takes a sort of gen- 
eral notice of it, contents itself, as Krafft-Ebing does, with calling 
night wandering "a nervous disease," "apparently a symptomatic 
manifestation of other neuroses, epilepsy, hysteria, status nervo- 
sus." 2 The older literature is more explicit. It produces not only a 
full casuistic but seeks to give some explanation aside from a 
reference to neurology. 3 So, for example, the safety in climbing 
upon dangerous places finds this explanation, that the sleep walker 
goes there with closed eyes and in this way does not see the danger, 
knows no giddiness and above all is in possession of a specially keen 
muscular sense. 

The phenomena of sleep walking and moon walking must be 
acknowledged, as far as I can see, almost entirely as pathological 
yet connected or identical with analogous manifestations of normal 
profound sleep. The dreams in such sleep, in contrast with those of 
light sleep, are characterized by movements. These often amount 
merely to speaking out, laughing, weeping, smacking, throwing one- 
self about and so on, or occasionally to complicated actions, 
which begin with leaving the bed. Further comparison shows the 
night wandering as symptomatically similar to hysterical and hyp- 
notic somnambulism. This interpretation might be objected to upon 
the ground that unfortunately we know nothing of the origin of the 
motor phenomena of the dream and that understanding of the hys- 
terical and hypnotic somnambulism is deplorably lacking. Still less 
has science to say about the influence of the moon upon night wan- 
dering. The authors extricate themselves from the difficulty by 
simply denying its influence. They bring forward as their chief 
argument for this that many sleep walkers are subject to their at- 
tacks as frequently in dark as in moonlight nights and when 
sleeping in rooms into which no beam of moonlight can penetrate. 
Spitta indeed explains it thus : " The much discussed and roman- 
tically treated ' moon walking ' is a legend which stands in contra- 
diction to hitherto observed facts. That the phantasy of the Ger- 
man folk mind drew to itself the pale ghostly light of the moon and 
could reckon from it all sorts of wonderful things, proves nothing 

2 Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. 

3 I introduce as the most important sources Peter Jessen : " Versuch einer 
wissenschaftlichen Begriindung der Psychologie," Berlin, 1855 (with many 
examples); Heinrich Spitta: "Die Schlaf- und Traumzustande der mensch- 
lichen Seele," 2d edition, 1882 (with abundant casuistic and literature) ; finally 
based upon these L. Lowenfeld : " Somnambulismus und Spiritismus," Grenz- 
fragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens, Vol. I, 1900. 



INTRODUCTION IX 

to us." I can only say here that ten negative cases signify nothing 
in the face of a single positive one and a thousand-fold experience 
undoubtedly represents a certain connection between the light of 
the full moon and the most complicated forms of sleep walking. 

Not merely does science avoid these things on account of their 
strangeness, but also the poets best informed in the things of the 
soul, whom the problems of night wandering and moon walking 
should stimulate. From the entire province of artistic literature I can 
mention only Shakespeare's " Macbeth," Kleist's " Prinz von Hom- 
burg," the novel "Maria" by Otto Ludwig, "Das Siindkind" by 
Anzengruber, " Jorn Uhl " by Gustav Frenssen and " Aebelo " by 
Sophus Michaelis. 4 Finally Ludwig Ganghofer has briefly sketched 
his own sleep walking in his autobiographical " Lebenslauf eines 
Optimisten," and Ludwig Tieck has given unrestrained expression to 
his passionate love toward this heavenly body in different portions 
of his works. 

Only in " Maria " and in " Aebelo " however do these themes 
play an important part, while in the other works mentioned they 
serve properly only as adornment and episodic ornament. I am not 
able to explain this unusual restraint, unless we accept the fact that 
our best poets shrink from touching upon questions which they 
themselves can so little understand. 

It has been expected that the psychoanalytic method, which 
casts such light upon the unconscious, might do much to advance the 
understanding of the problems of sleep walking and moon walking. 
But unfortunately no one undergoes such an expensive and time- 
consuming treatment as psychoanalysis for moon walking, so that 
the hoped for illumination can come at the best only as a by-product 
in the psychoanalysis of neurotics. That has in fact been my good 
fortune twice, where I have been able to lift the curtain, though 
only a little, in two cases among my patients and also in individuals 
who were otherwise healthy. What I discovered there, I will relate 
in detail in what follows. 

One point of view I will first set forth. Two questions appear 
to me to stand out among those closely bound with our theme. 
First on the motor side, Why does not the sleep walker, who is en- 
joying apparently a specially deep slumber, sleep on quietly and 
work out the complexes of his unconscious somehow in a dream, 

4 The text of Bellini's " Nachtwandlerin " could hardly be called litera- 
ture, nor Theodor Mundt's fabulous novel, " Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und 
Traum." The latter I will mention later in the text. 



X INTRODUCTION 

even though with speech or movement there? Why instead is he 
urged forth and driven to wander about and engage in all sorts of 
complicated acts? It is one of the most important functions of the 
dream to prolong sleep quietly. And then in the second place, What 
value and significance must be attributed to the moon and its light? 
These two chief questions must be answered by any theory that 
would do justice to the question of sleep walking and moon walking. 



PART I 
Medical 

Case I. Some years ago I treated a hysterical patient, exceed- 
ingly erotic. She was at that time twenty-two years old, and on her 
father's as well as on the mother's side, from a very degenerate 
family. Alcoholism and epilepsy could be traced with certainty to 
the third ascendant on both sides. The father's sister is mentally 
diseased, the patient's mother was an enuretic in her earlier years 
and a sleep walker. This mother, like her father when he was 
drunk, was markedly cruel and given to blows, characteristics, which 
according to our patient, sometimes almost deprived her of her 
senses and in her anger bordered upon frenzy. 

The patient herself had been as the youngest child the spoiled 
darling of both parents and until her seventh year had been taken 
by them into their bed in the morning to play. In her first (three 
years she always slept between the parents, preferably on the inner 
side of one of the two beds and with her legs spread, so that, in her 
mother's words : " One foot belongs to me and one to her father ! " 
She was most strongly drawn, however, to the mother, toward whom 
at an early age she was sexually stimulated, already in her first year, 
if her statements can be relied upon, when she sat upon her mother's 
lap while nursing. 

The little one early learned also that, when one is sick, one re- 
ceives new playthings and especially much petting and tenderness, 
on account of which she often pretended to be sick purposely or she 
phantasied about dark forms and ugly faces, which of course she 
never saw, except to compel the mother to stay with her and show 
her special love and tenderness. Already in her second year she 
would go to bed most dutifully, " right gladly " to please father and 
mother and gain sexual pleasure thereby. The father then let her 
ride on his knee, stroked her upon her buttocks and kissed her pas- 
sionately upon the lips. The desire after the mother became the 
stronger. When the latter had lain down and the little one had been 
good, then the child would creep to the mother under the feather 
bed and snuggle close to her body (" wind herself fast like a ser- 
pent"). The mother's firm body gave her extraordinary pleasure, 

I 



\ ^ 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 



•»t infrequently it led to the expulsion of a secretion from the 
. uteri. ("The good comes," as she expressed it.) I men- 
convulsive attacks and enuresis nocturna, as pathological affec- 
tions of her childhood which belong to my theme. The patient had 
in fact suffered in her first year a concussion of the brain, through 
being thrown against a brick wall, with organic eclamptic attacks as 
a result. The great love which she had experienced because of this 
led her also later to imitate those attacks hysterically. In the fourth 
year, for example, when she had to sleep in a child's crib, no longer 
between the beloved parents, she immediately produced attacks of 
anxiety in which she saw ugly faces and witches as in the beginning 
of the eclamptic convulsions. Thereupon the frightened mother 
took her again into her own bed. Later also she often began to 
moan and fret until the mother would take her in her arms to ward 
off the threatened attacks, and thus she could stimulate herself to 
her heart's content. As she reports, at the height of the orgasm she 
expelled a secretion, her body began to writhe convulsively, her face 
became red as fire, her eyes rolled about and she almost lost herself 
in her great pleasure. 

Concerning her enuresis, in its relation to urethral eroticism, the 
patient relates the following: "When I pressed myself against my 
mother's or brother's thigh, not only ' the good ' came, but frequently 
also urine with it. At about eight years old there was often a very 
strong compulsion to urinate, especially at night, which would cause 
me to wet my bed. This was however according to my wish to pass 
not urine but that same secretion which I had voided at two or three 
years old, when I became so wildly excited with my mother, that is 
when, lying in bed with her, I pressed her thigh between mine. I 
could not stop it in spite of all threats or punishments. Very cur- 
iously I usually awoke when I voided urine, but I could not retain 
it in the face of the great pleasure." 

I lay emphasis upon a specially strong homosexual tendency 5 
among her various perversions, although she had the usual sex rela- 
tions with a legion of men with complete satisfaction. Furthermore, 
as sadistic-masochistic traits, there was an abnormal pleasure in giv- 
ing and receiving blows and a passionate desire for blood. It was a 
sexual excitement that occurred when she saw her own blood or 
that of others. I have elsewhere 6 described this blood sadism and I 

5 This homosexual tendency was first directed toward her own mother in 
childhood and early puberty. 

6 "tJber den sado-masochistichen Komplex" Jahr. f. psychoanal. Forsch., 
Vol. 5, pp. 224-230. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 3 

will refer here to only two features, which are of significance also 
in regard to her moon walking. The first is her greatly exaggerated 
vaginal eroticism, which at menstruation especially was abnormally 
pleasurably excited. The second, on the other hand, was that our 
patient already at the age of two years should have experienced 
sexual pleasure in the mother's hemoptysis. Sitting on the mother's 
lap she stimulated herself upon the latter's breast, when she began 
to scrape and then to cough up blood. She reached after her bloody 
lips in order afterward to lick off her own fingers. As a result of 
the sexual overexcitement which occurred then, blood has afforded 
her enormous pleasure ever since, when she has looked upon it. 

As for the rest of her life, I will refer to two other points only, 
which are not without importance for our problem. First of all was 
the change of dwelling after the father's death in our patient's 
seventh year. The other is her burning desire, arising in her third 
or fourth year, to play mother and most eagerly with a real live 
child. A baby doll, of which she came into possession, was only a 
substitute, although for want of something better she carried this 
around passionately and did not once lay it out of her arms while 
asleep. At the age of eight it was her greatest delight to trudge 
around with a small two year old girl from the house and sing her 
to sleep as her mother had once done to her. " Carrying that child 
around was my greatest delight until I was fourteen years old." 

I mentioned above that her mother had been sadistic and at 
the same time a sleep walker. " Mother herself told me that she 
also rather frequently walked at night. As a child she would wan- 
der around in her room without being able to find her bed again. 
Over and over again she would pass it without finding her way into 
it. Then she would begin to cry loudly with fright for her bed 
until Grandmother awoke and lifted her into bed. In the morning 
she remembered nothing at all about it. 

" It was the same way with her desire to urinate. Every night 
she had a frightful need to urinate and hunted for the chamber, 
but, although it always stood in its accustomed place, she was not 
able to find it. Meanwhile the desire grew more severe, so that she 
began moaning fearfully in her sleep while hunting. She sought 
all over the room, even crept around under the bed without touch- 
ing or noticing the chamber, which was there. Often she did not 
then return to her bed until Grandmother was awakened by her 
moans, brought her what she wanted and helped her to bed. It 
happened rather frequently that, because of the very great need, she 



4 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

wet the bed or the room while on her search, whereupon naturally 
a whipping followed. Sometimes she lay quite quiet later on 
in her sleep, but when she could not find her bed, was obliged to 
pass half the night in the cold room. Once when I myself wet my 
bed, she struck me with the words : ' Every time that this happens 
you will be whipped ; my mother whipped me for this reason.' Al- 
though she knew from her own experience that it could not be 
helped, yet she struck me. 

" Besides the moon exercised a great power over my mother. 
Since the house in which she lived was low and stood out in the 
open country, and there were no window blinds, on bright moon- 
light nights the moon shone into the farthest corner. In the corner 
stood a box, on which were a number of flower pots, figures and 
glass covers. Upon this box she climbed, after she had first taken 
down one object after another and placed them on the floor with- 
out breaking anything. Then she began to dance upon the top of 
the box, but only on bright moonlight nights. Finally she put every- 
thing back in exactly the same place to a hair's breadth and climbed 
out of the window, but not before she had removed there a number 
of flower pots out of the way. From the window she reached the 
court where she rambled about, climbed over the garden fence and 
walked around at least an hour. Then she went back, arranged the 
flowers on the window in exact order and — could not find her way to 
bed. There was always a scene the next day if Grandmother had 
been wakened in the night." 

The most noteworthy feature in this statement, beside the 
phenomenon of sadism, later taken over by the daughter, the urethral 
eroticism and the susceptibility toward the moonlight, is the be- 
havior of the mother while walking in her sleep. She plainly has 
an idea where the flower pots stand, which she removes from the 
box and the window, but on the other hand she comes in contact 
neither with the bed nor the chamber, which yet are in their usual 
places. We will also take note further on of the dancing upon the 
box in the bright moonlight as well as the climbing out of the win- 
dow, climbing and walking about. 

Before I go on with my patient's story, something should be said 
concerning its origin. She had been undergoing psychoanalytic 
treatment with me for nine months on account of various severe 
hysterical symptoms, which I will not here touch upon further, when 
she one day came out with the proposal that she write for me her 
autobiography. I agreed to it and she brought me little by little 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 5 

about two hundred fifty pages of folio, which she had prepared 
without any influence on my part, except of course that she had, in 
those months of treatment, made the technique of the analysis very 
much her own as far as it touched upon her case. Practically noth- 
ing in our work together in solving her difficulties was said of her 
sleep walking. I have also in no way influenced or been able to in- 
fluence her explanation. It originates solely from the patient's asso- 
ciations and the employment of her newly acquired knowledge of 
the unconscious in the interpretation of her symptoms. 

I find then in her account of her life some highly interesting 
points. " Even at two or three years old Mother at my entreaties 
must soothe me to sleep. As we lay together in bed I pretended 
often to be asleep and reached as if ' in my sleep ' after my mother's 
breast in order to revel in sensation there. Also I often uncovered 
myself, again ostensibly in my sleep, and laid myself down quite 
contentedly. Then I awoke my mother by coughing, and when she 
awoke she stroked me and fondled me, and as was her custom kissed 
me also upon the genitals. Frequently I stood up in bed between 
my parents — a forerunner of my later sleep walking — and laid 
myself down at my mother's feet, asleep as she thought, but in 
reality awake only with eyes closed. Then I pulled the feather bed 
away from Mother and blinked at her in order to see her naked 
body, which I could do better from the foot than if I had lain near 
her. 

"If she awoke she took me up to my place, kissed me repeatedly 
over my whole body and covered me up. I opened my eyes then as 
if just awakening, she kissed me on the eyes and said I should go 
quietly to sleep again, which I then did. 

" Still earlier, at one or two years, I pretended to be asleep when 
my parents went to bed, that I might obtain caresses, because Father 
and Mother always said, ' See, how dear, what a little angel ! ' They 
kissed me then and I opened my eyes as if waking from deep sleep. 
This was the first time that I pretended to be asleep. I often lay 
thus for a long time apparently asleep but really awake. For when 
the parents saw that I was asleep, they told one another all sorts of 
things about us children. Especially Mother often spoke of my 
fine traits, or that people praised me and found me ' so dear ' which 
she never said in my presence lest she should make me vain." 

Here is an early preceding period when the little one delib- 
erately pretends to be asleep in order to hear loving things, receive 
caresses and experience sexual activity without having to be held 



6 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

accountable or to be afraid of receiving punishment, because every- 
thing happens in sleep. In the same way similar erotic motives and 
analagous behavior may be found in the account of her other actions 
while asleep. As she began to talk at two years old her parents 
begged her to tell everything that had happened to her, for example 
in the absence of either of them. She must tell to the minutest de- 
tail, when she awoke early lying between her parents, what had 
happened to her during the day before, what she had done with her 
brothers and sisters, what had taken place for her at school, and so 
on. She responded so much the more gladly, because in narrating 
all this she could excite herself more or less as well upon the father's 
as upon the mother's body. 

In fact, this was the very source of a direct compulsion to have 
to tell things, from which she often had to suffer frightfully. The 
very bigoted mother sent her regularly from her sixth, year on 
with her sister to the preaching services with the express injunc- 
tion to report the sermons at home. And although on account of 
her poor head she had to struggle grievously with every poem or 
bit of lesson which she had to learn for school, yet now at home she 
would seat herself upon a hassock, spread a handkerchief over 
her shoulders and begin to drone out the whole sermon as she had 
heard it in the church from the minister. And this all merely out 
of love for her mother! Furthermore she was, according to her 
own words, directly in love with her teacher in the school, who often 
struck her on account of her inattentiveness and certainly did not 
treat her otherwise with fondness. Here is a motive for the later 
learning, singing and reciting of poetry during the sleep walking, 
while the pleasure in being struck when at fault was increased by 
self reproach, that she in spite of all her pains was so bad at 
learning. 

" During my whole childhood," the patient states, " I talked a 
great deal in my sleep. When I had a task to learn by heart, I said 
over the given selection or the poem in my sleep. This happened 
the first time when I was eight years old, on a bright moonlight 
night. I was sleeping at the time in the bed with my sister and I 
arose in the night, recited a poem and sang songs. At about the 
same period, standing on a chair or on the bed, I repeated parts of 
sermons which I had heard the day before at church. Besides I 
prattled about everything which I had done the previous day or 
about my play. How often I was afraid that I would divulge some- 
thing from my sexual play with my brother ! That must never have 
happened, however, or mother would have mentioned it to me, for 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 7 

she always told me everything that I said during the night." I 
might perhaps sum up this activity in her sleep after this fashion: 
Day and night she is studying for the beloved but unresponsive 
teacher and strives to win and to keep her good will as well as that 
of the mother through the repeating of sermons and relating of all 
the events of the day. 

"As for the talking in my sleep, I began at the age of two or 
three, though awake, to pretend to be asleep and to speak out as if 
asleep. For example I acted as if I were tormented with frightful 
dreams and cried out with great terror, ostensibly in a dream: 
* Mother, Mother, take me ! ' or ' Stay with me ! ' or something of the 
sort. Then Mother took me, as I had anticipated, under her feather 
bed and quieted me, but I naturally became excited while I pressed 
my legs about her body presumably from fear of witches and imme- 
diately there occurred a ' convulsive attack,' that is I now expe- 
rienced such lustful pleasure that ' the good ' came." 

Attention may further be called to the fact that she threw her- 
self about violently in her sleep, which caused her, as the daughter 
of so brutal a mother, who was herself a sado-masochist, an ex- 
cessive amount of pleasurable sensation. When only two or three 
years old, as she lay between the parents, she pushed them with 
hands and feet, of which she was quite conscious, while they thought 
it happened in sleep. This brought the advantage that she was not 
responsible for anything which happened in sleep, for it occurred 
when she was in an unconscious condition. 

The changing of the home in her seventh year, after the death 
of the father, led to her sharing the bed of her sister six years older 
than she. " My sister had the habit of throwing off the covers in 
her sleep or twisting her legs about mine. I, on the other hand,, 
always hit her in my sleep with hands or feet. Naturally I could 
not help it since it actually happened while I was asleep, yet when 
my sister could stand it no longer I had to go and lie with Mother. 
I also struck her in my sleep. Besides I nestled up against her body, 
especially her buttocks, and experienced very pleasurable excite- 
ment. For it was simply impossible with her strong body and in 
the narrow bed to avoid touching my mother. Only I did it to her 
quite consciously, but she was of the impression that I pressed upon 
her in my sleep because I had no room in bed. The reason that I 
as a small child pushed against my parents in bed was simply the 
wish to be able to strike them once to my heart's desire, and since 
this was impossible during the day, I did it while asleep, when no 



8 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

one is responsible for what one does. Striking my sister then actu- 
ally in my sleep, when I was seven years old, was again the wish to 
be able to excite myself pleasurably by the blows as when a smaller 
child." Here her sadism again breaks through in this desire to 
strike mother and sister according to her heart's desire and it espe- 
cially excited her because of her constitutionally exaggerated muscle 
erotic. I have discussed this sadism at length elsewhere. 7 

It can be affirmed, if we examine her behavior in sleep, that with- 
out exception sexual wishes lay at the bottom of it, just as the dream 
also, as is well known, always represents the fulfilment of infantile 
wishes. The plainly erotic character is never wanting in an ap- 
parently asexual action, if we penetrate it more deeply. So for ex- 
ample this patient repeated the sermon at her mother's bidding in 
order to receive her love and praise. Saying her lessons at night 
arose from her strong attachment to her teacher, which .again in 
turn was a stage of her love for her mother. Naturally this was 
all concerned with wishes, which, strictly tabooed when awake, could 
only be gratified in unconsciousness, somehow carried out in sleep, 
or, as with the simulated convulsions, only in the mother's bed. The 
behavior during sleep served especially well to grant sexual pleas- 
ure but without guilt or liability to punishment. 

It was quite in order further that a conscious activity preceded 
the unconscious activity in sleep, that is, that for a time the patient 
while awake, but with closed eyes and therefore apparently asleep, 
did the very thing which later was done in actual unconsciousness. 
What then impressed itself as an unconscious performance during 
sleep, had been earlier done consciously, almost I might say as " a 
studied action." Only in special cases is there any need for playing 
such a comedy, for the direct demand of a beloved individual — 
" You must tell everything," " You must learn diligently," " Repeat 
the sermon accurately," — when the eroticism is well concealed, per- 
mits of open action without more hindrance. It may be noted 
further that the patient never betrayed in the least in her sleep what 
she must have been at pains carefully to conceal, as, for example, the 
sexual play with her brother. Finally the striking participation of 
the muscle erotic at times in sleep must be emphasized. 

We have found already as roots and motives of her sleep activity 
sexual, strongly forbidden wishes, which particularly could often 
be gratified only in bed; the striving that she might commit 
misdemeanor without being held guilty or answerable ; further the 

7 Cf. note 6, p. 163. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 9 

practicing of these things first while awake; and finally, as an or- 
ganic root, at least the pleasure in blows in sleep, the undeniably 
exaggerated muscle erotic. Nearly everything takes place in bed, 
only occasionally outside it, and then always near it. Complicated 
actions are completely wanting. Likewise nothing was said of the 
influence of the light or of the moon. Only in passing was it men- 
tioned that the patient arose in the moonlight for her first nightly 
recitation of lessons. 

The group of phenomena which we will now take up displays 
complicated performances and stands above all under the evident 
influence of the light of the moon. " In my fourth year," the patient 
relates, " I was put for the first time into a little bed of my own, so 
that my mother, who the day before had begun to cough up blood, 
should have more rest. She had closed the net of my crib and that 
I should not be frightened moved the crib up to her large bed. I 
pretended to be asleep and as soon as my parents had fallen asleep 
I climbed over the side but was so unfortunate as to fall into my 
mother's bed. I was quickly laid back in my own bed, without hav- 
ing seen the blood, which was my special longing. Often after 
this, almost every night, I tried again to climb into Mother's bed, 
so that finally she placed my bed by the wall in order to prevent my 
climbing over to her. For some months I slept alone in my little 
bed. She caught me one night, however, this time actually in my 
sleep, trying to climb over the side but entangled in the net. For- 
tunately I did not fall out but back into bed. At that time I pro- 
duced also my pretended convulsive attacks that I might be taken 
by Mother into her bed and be able to excite myself upon her. 

" Mother began raising blood again when I was ten years old and 
we had already moved into the new home. That year she was 
seized twice with such severe hemorrhages that for weeks she 
hovered between life and death. Then in my eleventh year I began 
my sleep walking. What urged me to it was again Mother's cough- 
ing of blood as well as the desire to see her blood, both reasons why 
I had already at four years old pretended sleep so that I could climb 
into Mother's bed." 

The patient proved herself such an ideal nurse on the occasion 
of the mother's severe hemorrhage that the mother would have no 
one else. She watched tirelessly day and night together with her 
sisters, changing every few minutes the icebags which had been 
ordered. " Scarcely a moment did I tear myself away from my 
mother's bedside and, if one of my sisters relieved me, I often could 



10 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

hardly move, undress myself and lie down for an hour. If I did 
lie down, I threw myself about restlessly, torn with anxiety, and 
was only happy again when I sat by my mother's bed." This fear- 
ful anxiety was not however merely fear for the precious life of 
the mother, but still more, repressed libido. In spite of all her con- 
cern for the mother's suffering she could not prevent the strongest 
sexual pleasurable sensations at the sight of the mother's snow white 
breast in putting on the applications or when she raised blood. This 
intensive nursing lasted four weeks until finally a nursing Sister 
came to assist. 

"As I now for the first time could enjoy a full night's rest, I 
fell into a deep sleep, as from this time on I always did before every 
sleep walking. Near my bed stood the table with Mother's medicine 
and on the window ledge, behind the curtain, a lamp, which threw 
its light upon my bed. Suddenly I arose in my sleep, went to my 
mother's bed, bent over her. Mother opened her eyes but did not 
rouse herself. Then the Sister, who was dozing on the sofa near 
Mother's bed, awoke and rushed forward frightened as she saw me 
there in my nightgown. She thought something had happened to 
Mother, but the latter motioned with her hand to leave me alone and 
to keep still. I kissed Mother and changed the icebag, apparently in 
order to see her breast. I could see no blood this time, so without 
a sound I moved away and went to the table, where I put all the 
medicines carefully together to make a place and then went out into 
the pitch dark kitchen without stumbling against anything. There I 
took from the kitchen dresser a bowl with a saucer and a spoon and 
came back again to the room. Next I seized a glass of water which 
:5tood there and poured the water carefully into the bowl without 
^spilling more than a drop. With this I spoke out half aloud to my- 
self : ' Now Emil (my brother-in-law, who had for a long time taken 
•his breakfast with us) can come to his breakfast without disturbing 
Mother, who had always prepared it for him. Then I went to bed 
and slept soundly for some hours, as I sleep only at my periods of 
sleep walking, without crying out. All that I have described the 
Sister of Charity told me afterward. Naturally I did everything 
with closed eyes, without knowing it, and moved about as securely 
in the darkness as if it had been bright day. The next morning 
they told me about it and laughed over it." 

This is what she has to say of the influence of the light upon her 
sleep walking. "Here also Mother's coughing was the external 
cause as it had been when I was four years old. When Mother was 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING II 

ill, the lamp was left upon the window sill behind the curtain, burn- 
ing brightly so that she would not be afraid. Now also, at the time 
of my first complicated sleep walking, such a light was burning 
behind the curtain throwing its light upon my bed and the wall. 
Mother had always left the light burning in order to see me at once, 
after I had sometimes climbed over the side of my crib at the age 
of four, when she was ill. The light however made me climb over 
to her, because in the dark no blood could be seen. Also when I 
began to moan, during my convulsive attacks, she made a light and 
came to my bed. Or she said, when my bed was pushed close to 
hers : ' Wait a moment ; I will make a light and take you or you can 
climb over to me.' Next day I laughed with my parents over my 
visit at night, without suspecting that I would soon be repeating it 
actually in my sleep. And it was only for this, that I might, as at 
the very first time, enjoy the sight of Mother's blood. Now, when 
she had a light burning during her illness, this allured me in my 
sleep to climb out to her, as at that first time when she had made a 
light especially for me to climb over to her." 

The following memory leads still deeper into the etiology: 
" Mother always had the habit of going from bed to bed, when we 
children were asleep, and lighting us with her lamp to make sure 
that we were asleep. I perceived the light in my sleep, which called 
me to Mother. She had lighted me that first time so that I might 
ciimb into bed with her. Now I thought in my sleep, when I saw 
the light, that she was calling me again and she found me often at 
the very point of climbing over to her. I see myself yet today with 
one foot over the bars, almost in a riding position. Yet nothing 
ever happened to me. A complete change took place within me when 
the light of a candle or a lamp fell upon my face. I might almost 
say that I experienced a great feeling of pleasure. I seemed to 
myself in my sleep to be a supernatural being. I immediately per- 
ceived the light even when I lay in deepest sleep. There was how- 
ever no sign of waking. This must represent a second form of con- 
sciounsess, which possessed me at such times. I often asked my 
mother all sorts of things while wandering about, always knew to 
whom I spoke although I did not see the person and before I heard 
anyone speak I already mentioned the person's name. My orienta- 
tion in sleep walking was so exact that I never once stubbed my toe 
against anything. It was just so with urination, which was prob- 
ably connected with the moon or with a night light accidentally fall- 
ing upon me. As soon as I pressed out secretion or the urine came, 



12 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

I found myself in a half sleep without being able to prevent an ex- 
cessive feeling of pleasure. Then first I came to myself. This 
seems to me to go back to the fact that Mother often awoke me on 
special occasions in the night, holding a lamp or a candle in her 
hand to set me on the chamber, especially when she heard me moan- 
ing in my sleep and suspected a convulsive attack." 

In what follows a complete identification with the mother is re- 
ported in detail. That has come in part to our notice in the first 
sleep walking, when our patient prepares the breakfast for her 
brother-in-law. "After that first sleep walking when Mother was 
having hemorrhages, they took place now rather frequently, when 
the least glimmer of light fell upon me, when Mother, for instance, 
lighted a candle at night to take some drops for her cough. Thus 
it happened that almost every night, as long as our beds stood to- 
gether, I acted this little part. Often my family did not awaken and 
yet we knew the next day, when something was missing, that I had 
been the culprit in my sleep, as the next little example will show. 

" My greatest wish at that time, at ten years old, was to be 
* Mother ' and have a child that I might bring up as I pleased. One 
morning when Mother got up and wished to dress herself she did 
not find her underclothing. We sisters were still fast asleep and 
Mother did not wish to waken us. She could remember exactly 
that she had laid her clothing as she always did on the chair near her 
bed. When she saw that search was in vain she put on fresh linen. 
Fully an hour later I awoke and was completely astonished to find 
myself dressed and in Mother's clothing. The puzzle was now 
solved. The putting on of Mother's clothing during the sleep walk- 
ing had plainly been merely my wish to put myself into the mother's 
place and also to play mother, as I did with the children day after 
day. It was just at this time that I was always seeking to trail 
around all day with children, whom I tormented, treated cruelly, 
often even struck them for no cause whatever, always with a great 
feeling of pleasure, as I myself fared at my mother's hands. It was 
very frequently the case that I spread the table for a meal, in 
Mother's place, or put on her linen or outer clothing. This hap- 
pened most often when she was ill again with her cough or the light 
shone upon me in my sleep. The light of the candle was sufficient 
for this." 

At thirteen years she began to be directly affected by the moon- 
light. " At that time I had to sleep in a small room which by brother 
had occupied before this. This room looked out upon the court and 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 1 3 

was, especially on the nights when the moon was full, as bright as 
if a lamp were burning in the room. I was very much afraid to 
sleep alone in a room. This was the first time in my life that it had 
happened. I feared that in every corner some one might be stand- 
ing and suddenly step forth or might lie hidden behind the bed and 
although I first let the candle light shine over everything, I had no 
rest but was in continual fear. I slept here perhaps only fourteen 
days in all, but it was full moon just at this time and rather bright 
in the small room. 

Before going to sleep I always barred the door of the room, 
which near the other door of our house opened upon a small pas- 
sage. On account of the shop we lived on an upper floor. When 
I lay in bed I was always thinking that I had not bolted the door 
well and every night I arose three or four times before going to 
sleep in order to make sure whether I had actually bolted the door 
carefully. This I did while awake. Finally I fell asleep. I knew 
nothing in the morning of what happened in the night. Yet for 
several days, when I arose in the morning, I found the door which 
led out of my room upon the passage standing open. I must also 
have gone about the house during the night, at least have been in 
the passage. It alarmed Mother and, when early the next day the 
door was once more open, she said that I need never sleep alone 
again. I had not had the remotest thought that she would watch me 
the next night. As usual she could, when I talked in my sleep, ask 
me about everything and obtain correct answers without wakening 
me. If however she called my name in fright, when I was walking, 
as in the scene about to be described, then I awoke. Some nights 
apparently I roamed about in the house, God knows where, in the 
moonlight, without any one noticing it. Now it was the window in 
the passage, which looked into the court and was always closed at 
night, that was left open. What took place there I cannot say, since 
no one observed me. I can however describe clearly what my 
mother saw happen and which she told me afterward. 

" Before I lay down I tried the door several times to see if it were 
securely bolted, then slept until about twelve o'clock. Between 
twelve and one o'clock, when I as a child had always been most 
afraid because this was a ghostly hour, my mother, who compelled 
herself this night to remain awake, heard my door creak slightly. 
She watched and saw the following: I went out in my nightgown 
softly to the door and to the window on the passage, which I opened. 
I swung myself upon that rather high window and remained there 



14 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

a while without moving, sitting there while I gazed straight at the 
moon. Then — it seemed to my mother like an eternity — I climbed 
down softly and went quietly along the passage into the first story. 
Half way along however I considered, turned back and went into 
my room. Having reached the door I turned once again and went 
along the passage to the door of the court. This was fastened. 
Again I turned and now went to the house gate. There I remained 
standing. I even tried to open it, as if I heard my name called. 
Then I was frightened, looked about me and was awake. Shaking 
with cold, for I was there half naked, I could scarcely orient my- 
self. Then I crept to my bed and slept without waking. 

"This happened in the second week. Every morning my door 
was open so that I had to sleep again in Mother's room. The moon 
never shone in there and the night light was covered. Neverthe- 
less the sleep walking began also in this room in two weeks,- if only 
the light of the candle fell upon me in my sleep. More often I 
lighted the candle myself in my sleep and went around in the room 
and the kitchen. Sometimes Mother found me standing by the door 
of the shop apparently about to open it and walk out. Now I have 
frequently, when I am lying in bed, the desire to spring out of the 
window, or to open both casements to get air for I am often afraid 
of choking. Mother had often felt this way in her illness. It also 
happened that Mother found me sitting by my chest, where I was 
looking for something which I had needed the day before and in- 
tended looking for the next day. I had laid out all my possessions 
about me. If Mother called me by name, I awoke; if she did not 
call me but only spoke in a certain way to me, I answered her every- 
thing without waking. I got up in my sleep, put on my mother's 
clothes, put on a cape and a nightcap, bade farewell to the children, 
to whom I wanted to be the mother, charged them to be brave and 
promised to bring them something. Then I took a piece of wood in 
my hand for an umbrella and walked about the room as if holding 
it opened out over my head because the sun shone. In reality it 
was the shining of the lamp. Mother's clothes were long and yet 
I wore the train beautifully and gracefully, without stepping on the 
skirt. My mother doubled herself with laughter when she saw such 
a caricature. Mostly I played the mother. Often I carried a small 
piece of wood wrapped in a cloth as a child in my arm and laid it on 
my breast. I sang songs, hushed at the same time other children — 
and knew nothing at all of it next day. Mother laughed most over 
this, that when I dressed myself, I first turned everything wrong 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 15 

side out. This goes back to the fact that Mother sometimes, when 
she had to get up in the night on my account and was half asleep, 
slipped her robe on twisted and wrong side out. These things lasted 
until my seventeenth year, when Mother was sick and I, as related 
above, made coffee in the presence of the Sister of Mercy. 8 

" Mother was rather often ill, so that beside the care of her, in 
which later a nurse assisted us, the shop had also to be looked after, 
which always demanded one person during the day. If I lay down 
upon my bed after two or three weeks of nursing, I fell into a deep 
sleep. This never hindered me however from being in my place to 
the minute, when my mother's medicine was to be taken. My mother 
could have anything from me, although I lay in a deep sleep. She 
did not need to speak, and if she wanted anything, she spoke it half 
aloud. The Sister, over weary from night watching, slept lightly, 
but if Mother needed anything, it was sufficient for her to breathe 
my name and I was awake, although otherwise I did not hear well 
and must always be aroused for some time before I was fully awake. 

" In reality I merely imitated my mother in my sleep walking. 
In the first place it was my wish to hold some object in my arms 
during the night, or lay it near me, as if it were my child, to have 
one that I might play with it sexually. In the second place this went 

8 I have here given word for word what the patient wrote down. When 
I then pointed out to her the evident contradiction, that she had misplaced 
something into the seventeenth year, which according to an earlier state- 
ment must have happened in the eleventh year, she answered that here 
was in fact an earlier mistake, since her brothr-in-law Emil had first taken 
breakfast with her mother in her seventeenth year. The facts were these : 
She had walked a great deal in her sleep from. her eleventh to her seventeenth 
year, for her mother had always suffered from hemoptysis, with occasional 
intermissions, and on this account had a nurse at various times. She had in 
fact at eleven years done everything which she has described above, only the 
making of the coffee for the brother-in-law happened in the seventeenth year. 
Besides, all the other actions performed in sleep are correctly given. On 
being questioned, she stated that her menses occurred first between her thir- 
teenth and fourteenth years and at the time of menstruation particularly she 
had walked a great deal. She was always very much excited sexually before 
her period, slept very restlessly and had always at that time arisen in her 
sleep. Blood always excited her excessively sexually, as has been already 
mentioned in the text. I will add just at this place that her exact dates, 
when an event appears in the very first years of her life, must be taken with 
a grain of salt, because falsification of memory is always to be found there. 
This, however, is not of great importance because the facts are authentically 
correct and at least agree approximately with the times specified, as I have 
convinced myself through questioning her relatives. 



1 6 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

back to my early childhood when I lay near my mother and she 
played thus with me. In the third place it referred to a later time 
when I felt as a mother toward my doll, and never allowed it out of 
my lap by day nor out of my arms at night. When Mother wished 
to quiet me if I was suddenly afraid of ugly creatures at night, she 
had to make a light as quickly as possible. Then she took me upon 
her arm or laid me close to her. The light must however remain 
burning until I had fallen asleep so that the horrible faces could not 
torture me. As a child I often cried only for the light ; it was the 
light that first completely quieted me. I longed indeed for the 
light that I might see the blood, and at the same time excite myself 
upon my mother." 

The patient proceeds in her story: "This continued until the 
seventeenth year. At eighteen I had to go into the country because 
of a nervous trouble. There I was quite alone and also had to sleep 
alone in a room. I always went to sleep very late and once — my 
small room was bright with moonlight — I arose, went into the small 
passageway, which opened into the court, and was going out of the 
courtyard gate. I was obliged to turn back, however, because this 
was fastened. Yet instead of going back to my room, I went into 
the sleeping room of my landlady, who was sleeping there with her 
daughter, a girl of about twenty-six years. The moon was also 
shining into this room and I slowly opened the door. Both of them 
then awoke and were, as they told me next day, frightened to death. 
It affected the daughter especially, so that she was terrified and at 
once sought refuge in her mother's bed. I went back. What hap- 
pened further I cannot say, for the daughter had immediately bolted 
the door behind me. I had made it impossible for me to stay longer 
in the little country village, and although I had paid for my room 
for a month I preferred to go away two days later. All the people 
avoided me and looked at me askance. Most of all the people with 
whom I was stopping ! I saw that a stone rolled from their hearts 
when I departed." At my question, whether she perhaps had been 
especially attracted by her landlady, she answered : " No, but in fact 
with another woman of the village. And it seems that I at that time 
wished to go to this woman in my sleep walking. At least the land- 
lady's room, into which I went, after I found the gate of the court- 
yard fastened, lay in the direction of the house where she lived. 

" From this time nothing is known of my walking in my sleep 
even on moonlight nights. Only I have sometimes since that time 
put on my underclothes in the night, but always my own. That is I 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 1 7 

have often discovered in the morning, up till quite recently, that I 
had on my linen or my stockings. Besides I often dressed my hair 
during the night, and if I had had my hair, for example, braided or 
loose when I went to sleep, I would awaken in the morning with my 
hair put upon my head. This unconscious hair dressing happened 
most frequently before menstruation and was then an absolute sign 
that this would take place very soon. This has the following con- 
nection. Mother never went to sleep with her hair done up, but 
when in bed had it always hanging down in a braid. Only, when 
she was suffering from the hemorrhages — at the time of menstrua- 
tion I also lost a good deal of blood — she did not have the braid 
hanging down but put up upon her head. Before the appearance of 
menstruation this braid hanging down annoyed me very much. 
Furthermore, the doing of my hair in my sleep, which occurred a 
few days before, is only the wish again to see blood, for which 
reason it appears only usually before menstruation." I will add to 
complete this that the ceasing of her sleep walking at her eighteenth 
year was contemporaneous with her taking up regular sexual rela- 
tions with different men. 

The patient gives still other important illustrations of her awak- 
ing at the calling of her name by her mother, and of staring into the 
light, particularly the moon. " In school my thoughts were always 
on the sexual and therefore I heard nothing when an example was 
explained. I often resolved to listen attentively, but in a few minutes 
I was again occupied with sexual phantasies. Then if I heard my 
name called I woke up suddenly but had first to orient myself and 
think where I was. This awaking at the calling of my name at 
school was exactly like that when my mother called me by name 
during my sleep walking. Both times I was startled and awoke as 
if from a heavy dream. That excessive dreaming while awake goes 
back however to my earliest childhood, when I sat evenings on my 
mother's lap, while my parents were talking together, and excited 
myself with her. Oh, what wonderful things I dreamed ! I always 
revelled then in sexual phantasies, and, completely lost in them, for- 
got entirely where I was until I suddenly heard my name called, 
when I started up frightened and had first to orient myself. Mother 
always called my name softly and usually added, when I began to 
yawn, 'the pillow is calling you,' and imitating a wee voice, 'You 
ought to come to it in bed.' " 

Once more : " When evenings I began to dream on mother's lap, 
I was compelled to look directly into the flame of the lamp. I 



1 8 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

looked straight into it and was as if hypnotized. I laid both hands 
upon my mother's breasts and traced their form. Besides I had my 
braid lying upon her left breast, which I liked very much, because it 
lay as softly as upon a pillow. I was also compelled to look into the 
light, gazed steadily at the flame until my eyes were closed. Then I 
lay in a half sleep, in which I heard the voices of the family without 
understanding what was said. Thus I could dream best, until my 
mother called my name and I awoke. 

" Every day I took delight in this sleep by the light of the lamp 
and the pleasure experienced upon my mother's lap. I lay quietly 
and with eyes closed so that they all thought I was fast asleep. Yet 
I knew indeed that it was no ordinary sleep, but merely a ' day- 
dream,' from which I only awoke when Mother called me by name. 
When she did not do this, but quietly undressed me and put me into 
bed, I began to be restless. I stood up in bed, lay down at their feet 
and took care to cry out and throw myself about until Mother, quite 
alarmed, called me by name and quieted me. I believe that in these 
experiences lies another root for my staring at the moon when sleep 
walking, as well as for the dreamy state occasioned by the fixed gaz- 
ing at the light." 

In conclusion there are still some less important psychic over- 
determinations. " I often had the desire, when looking at the moon 
at the age of four or five, to climb over the houses into the moon. I 
knew nothing at that time of sleep walkers. About the same time 
my sisters often sang the well-known song: 'What sort of a wry 
face are you making, oh Moon ? - I stared immovably also at the 
moon, when I had the opportunity to look at it once from my win- 
dow, in order that I might discover its face and eyes. Then, too, 
my eyes grew weary and began to close. Later, when nine or ten 
years old, I heard other children say that people dwelt in the moon. 
I would have given anything to know how these people looked, and 
whenever it was full moon, I gazed fixedly at it. I had understood 
that another people dwelt there of a different race. I wished to 
have another race of men. Perhaps they had other customs, thought 
differently, ran about naked as in Paradise and there I wished to go, 
and lead a free life with boys as with girls. Eren as a child I 
seemed to myself quite different from the rest of humankind on ac- 
count of my sexual concerns and sexual phantasies in school. I 
always believed that I was something peculiar and for that reason 
belonged not on the earth but upon the moon. Once when I heard 
the word 'mooncalf and asked what it meant, some one at home 
told me that mooncalves were deformed children. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 19 

" I thought however that they did not understand ; the children 
were quite differently formed, just as were all the people in the 
moon, so that their feelings were altogether different and they led 
a sexual life of a quite different kind. I thought they were kind to 
both sexes, because Mother always said, 'You must not be alone 
with boys ! ' and that in the moon this was permitted, for there no 
distinction was made between the sexes in play." 

I asked her more particularly in conclusion whether her explana- 
tion for staring at the moon, that she identified moon and lamp- 
light, was all there was of it. She answered immediately that an- 
other explanation had pressed itself upon her earlier, which she had 
rejected as "too foolish." "The moon's shining disk reminded me 
in fact of a woman's smooth body, the abdomen and most of all the 
buttocks. It excited me very greatly if I saw a woman from behind. 
Whenever I am fondling any one erotically and have my hand on 
the buttocks — I always think then of a woman — the moon always 
occurs to me but in the thought of a woman's body." 

According to this explanation the sleep walker would have also 
stared at the planet, because the round sphere awoke sexual child- 
hood memories of the woman's body, or, as I learned from another 
source, of the woman's breast, most frequently however of her but- 
tocks. It is moreover noteworthy that it was always only the full 
moon that worked thus attractively, not by chance the half moon or 
the sickle. An everyday experience agrees very well with this. 
Children, when they see the full moon or their attention is called to 
it, begin to snigger. Every one familiar with the child psyche knows 
that such giggling is based on sexual meaning, because the little 
ones usually think of the nates. Not infrequently will children, 
when they are placed on the chamber, pull away their nightclothes 
with the words, " Now the full moon is up," likewise when a child 
accidentally or intentionally bares himself at that spot. 

We have now the explanation, if we put together that which has 
just been told us, why our sleep walker wakes up on the spot and 
comes to herself as soon as she is called by name. This corresponds 
to her starting awake when in school she was recalled from her 
sexual daydreams and the earlier being startled when the mother 
called her out of similar sexual phantasies to go to sleep. The infer- 
ence may be drawn from this however that one is startled from 
sexual dreaming also when the name is called during sleep walking, 
or going a step further, that sexual phantasies are at the bottom of 
sleep walking in the moonlight and first find their fulfilment here. 



20 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

Could the interpretation of our patient be generalized, it might 
be said that the sleep walker climbs upon the roofs as a fulfilment 
of a childish wish to climb up into the very moon. It is of sig- 
nificance also how far we may consider universal her infantile be- 
lief that everything sexual is permitted upon the moon, that what 
was strongly forbidden her upon earth was there allowed to other 
children, and further the opinion that she was quite different because 
of her sexual phantasying and did not after all belong upon the 
earth but on the moon. At any rate the two motives introduced 
for staring at the moon's disk may be frequently met, are perhaps 
constantly present, that is the similarity of the moonlight and lamp- 
light and the comparison of the moon's disk to the human body, 
especially the nates. 

Let us attempt to realize now what this case before us may have 
to teach, the first and so far the only one of its kind to be submitted 
to a careful analysis. It must naturally be candidly confessed from 
the start that from a single case history, be it ever so clearly and 
fully set forth, no general conclusions may be drawn. Moreover 
certain factors resist generalization because they are of a more 
specialized character and at most will only occasionally reappear, as 
for example, the strong sadistic note, the desire for blood, the hem- 
optysis of the beloved mother. More frequently, also with the 
female sex, there may be the wish to climb into bed with the parents 
or their substitutes, to play the role of mother or father, out of love 
for them, and finally in general homosexuality may be a driving 
factor. 

It is the sexual coloring and motivation of the sleep walking, 
especially by the light of the moon, which gives throughout the 
strongest tone to our case. This is something which the scientific 
authors have so far as good as completely overlooked, even where 
it has forced itself into view, as in a series of cases cited by Kraflt- 
Ebing. 9 We shall hear, in discussing the works of the poets, that 

9 E. g., "A monk of a melancholy disposition and known to be a sleep 
walker, betook himself one evening to the room of his prior, who, as it hap- 
pened, had not yet gone to bed, but sat at his work table. The monk had a 
knife in his hand, his eyes were open and without swerving he made straight 
at the bed of the prior without looking at him or the light burning in the 
room. He felt in the bed for the body, stuck it three times with the knife 
and turned with a satisfied countenance back to his cell, the door of which 
he closed. In the morning he told the horrified prior that he had dreamed 
that the latter had murdered his mother, and that her bloody shadow had 
appeared to him to summon him to avenge her. He had hastened to arise 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 21 

they and the folk place this very motive before all others, indeed 
often take it as the only one. We have here once more before us, 
if this opinion be correct, a scientific erotophobia, that is the dread 
— mostly among physicians and psychologists — of sexuality, al- 
though this is at least one of the chief driving instincts of human 
life. 

There exists a better agreement of opinion over the relation- 
ship between sleep walking and the dream. Sleep walking, anal- 
ogously to the latter, fulfills also wishes of the day, behind which 
stand always wishes from childhood. Only it must also be empha- 
sized that the old, like the recent wishes, are exclusively or pre- 
dominantly of a sexual nature. Because however that sexual de- 
sire is forbidden in the waking life, it must even as in the dream 
take refuge in the sleeping state, where it can be gratified uncon- 
sciously and therefore without guilt or punishment. Most of the 
sleep activities of our patient were performed originally in a state 
of apparent sleep, that is actually practiced in the conscious state 
until later they were carried out quite unconsciously. She would 
never then betray what when feigning sleep she had to conceal as 
causes. Finally the directly precipitating causes in her erotic nature 
for the sleep walking and moon walking seem especially to have 
been light and the shining of the moon, her puberty and her mother's 
sickness. 

All of our patient's sleep walking, in accordance with the etiol- 
ogy and interpretation, since it goes back to infantile sexuality, is 

and had stabbed the prior. Immediately he had awakened in his bed, bathed 
in perspiration, and had thanked God that it had been only a frightful dream. 
The monk was horrified when the prior told him what had taken place." The 
following cases besides : " A shoemaker's apprentice, tortured for a long time 
with jealousy, climbed in his sleep over the roof to his beloved, stabbed her 
and went back to bed." Another, " A sleep walker in Naples stabbed his wife 
because of an idea in a dream that she was untrue to himl " We may con- 
clude, on the ground of our analytical experiences, that the untrue maiden 
always represents the mother of the sleep walker, who has been faithless to 
him with the father. The hatred thoughts toward this rival lead in the first 
dream to the reverse Hamlet motive, the mother has demanded that the son 
take revenge upon the father. Finally Krafft-Ebing gives still other cases: 
"A pastor, who would have been removed from his post on account of the 
pregnancy of a girl, was acquitted because he proved that he was a sleep 
walker and made it appear that in this condition ( ?) the forbidden relation- 
ship had taken place." Also, " The case of a girl who was sexually mis- 
handled in the somnambulistic condition. Only in the attacks had she con- 
sciousness of having submitted to sexual relations, but not in the free 
intervals." 



22 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

half sexual, half outspokenly infantile. It reaches the greatest de- 
gree, indeed the moon walking sets in just at the time of sexual 
maturity and leads to the most complicated actions before the menses, 
that is at the time of the greatest sexual excitement. And this 
activity in sleep and the moon walking too almost cease when the 
patient enters upon regular sexual intercourse. The shining of 
every light stimulates her sexually, especially that of the moon. 
The wandering about in her nightgown or in the scantiest clothing 
is plainly erotically conditioned (exhibition), but also the going 
about in the ghostly hours (see later), finally the being wakened 
through the softest calling of her name by the mother, with whom 
alone she stands in a contact like that of hypnotic somnambulism. 

Purely childish moreover is the clever technique of disguise. First 
she simulates illness or fear in order to be taken into the mother's 
bed. Then she pretends to be asleep, talks in her sleep, throws her- 
self about in her sleep, that she may be able to do everything with- 
out punishment and without being blamed, finally plays the mother 
in a manner which corresponds completely to child's play. Also 
later, before and after wandering in the bright moonlight, she pro- 
duces specially deep sleep and first as if in an obsession tries the 
door repeatedly to see if it is closed. I see in this, naturally apart 
from possible organic causes of profound sleep, an unconscious pur- 
pose, which plainly insists: "Just see, how sound-asleep I am (we 
are reminded of the earlier pretending to be asleep) and how 
afraid I am that the door might be left open ! Whoever has to walk 
about in spite of such sound sleep and such precaution, and even 
perhaps do certain things which might be sexually interpreted, he 
plainly is not to blame for it ! " 

We might add from knowledge of the neuroses that the fear that 
some one might be hiding in the room signifies the wish that this 
might be so in order that the subject might be sexually gratified. 
There was one circumstance most convincing in regard to this, which 
I will now add. Even during the time of her psychoanalytic treat- 
ment, when she did not wander at night any more nor perform com- 
plicated acts in her sleep, she had a number of times in the country 
carefully locked the door of her room in the evening, only to find it 
open again in the morning. To be sure, her lover of that period 
slept under the same roof, though at some distance from her. 

Before I go more closely into the question as to what share the 
light had upon the sleep walking of our patient, I will recall once 
more that her actions during sleep were at first but few and had 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 23 

nothing to do with the light. As the years went by they became 
more complicated and finally took place only under the influence of 
the light, whether it was artificial or natural, that is of the moon. 
More extended walks were in general possible only in the light of the 
moon, which as a heavenly body shining everywhere threw its bright- 
ness over every thing, in the court, garden and over the street, while 
candles or lamps at the best lighted one or two rooms. The patient, 
given to sleep walking or moon walking, went after the light, which 
meanwhile represented to her from childhood on a symbol of the 
parents' love and gave hope of sexual enjoyment. 

It was also bound inseparably within with motor activities of an 
erotic nature. When her mother approached her bed with the light 
it was a reminder to the child, Now you must go upon the cham- 
ber and you can pass " the good," or, when she sat on the mother's 
lap and gazed into the lamplight, Now you may stimulate yourself 
according to your heart's desire. Then the lamp was shining when 
the little one wished to climb into bed with the mother in order that, 
while exhibiting herself, she might see her as scantily covered as pos- 
sible. And finally the striking of the light announced, " the mother 
is sick, in nursing her you will have the opportunity to see her bared 
breasts and her blood." Evidently the light thus led, when she 
climbed after it, to the greatest experience of sexual pleasure of her 
earliest childhood. On account of this strong libido possession the 
memory of the light was kept alive in the unconscious and it needed 
only that the light of the lamp or the candle should fall upon the 
face of the wanderer to permit her to experience in the most pro- 
found sleep the same pleasure, the unconscious was set into activity 
and everything was accomplished most manifestly according to the 
purpose that served her strong libido. 

It is remarkable that our patient distinguished immediately a 
strong feeling of pleasure by the shining of every light, that more- 
over she seemed to herself as a supernatural being (glorification 
through the sexual feeling of pleasure 10 ), that she herself imagined 
it must represent a second sort of consciousness, and finally that she 
stood in such contact with the beloved person as that of a hypnotized 
subject — somnambulist — with her hypnotist. For she perceived 
also the mother's lightest word when most soundly asleep, in spite of 
her difficulty in hearing at other times. 

What was the patient's intention in her longer walks under the 

10 One thinks of the halo in religious pictures, which indeed is nothing 
else than the shining of the light about the head. 

3 



24 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

moon's influence, that she, for instance, climbed to the first story, 
reflected for a moment and then started to go out at the gate ? That 
becomes comprehensible when it is remembered that she once opened 
the door in her sleep for her lover in the country and furthermore 
in her first complicated sleep walking. The purpose of the latter has 
been stated, to climb into her mother's bed in order to obtain the 
greatest sexual pleasure. I do not believe I am far astray when I 
assume that this erotic desire of the child lies also essentially at the 
basis of her more extensive wandering in the moonlight. She 
simply wishes each time to go to the bed of some beloved one, which, 
as we shall hear later, is accepted by poets and the folk mind as a 
chief motive, and a fundamental one for many instances of sleep 
walking, especially with maidens. 

It becomes clear now, likewise, why the patient climbs into the 
first story, then recollects herself and seeks to go out at the gate. 
In her seventh year she and her family had changed their abode 
and this had been before in the first story but was now on an 
upper floor. She is trying yet to climb into the mother's bed, this 
still remaining as a fundamental motive. Only she is not seeking 
the bed where it stands at the present time but where it stood in 
childhood, in the first story and in another house. She goes, there- 
fore, downstairs but remembers, unconsciously of course, that this is 
not the right floor and wants now to go out at the gate to find the 
home of her childhood. Later in the country when she so thor- 
oughly frightens her landlady and her daughter, there she is also 
going to a woman she loves and she leaves the house for this pur- 
pose and goes at least into the room that lies in the direction of the 
house where the beloved lies. Later still she opens the door wide in 
her sleep so that her lover can have free entrance. 

We might also explain now in great part the sleep walking of the 
mother. As far as I can discover, the mother also as a very small 
child lived in another home than the one in which her sleep walking 
began. She ran about her room at night and could not find her 
bed and felt around in distress without coming upon the chamber, 
both of which stood in the usual places. This may be explained by 
the fact that in phantasy she was seeking the bed and chamber of 
her earliest childhood, which of course stood elsewhere. Moreover 
she attained by her moaning the fulfilment of her unconscious wish 
to be set by her mother upon the chamber and then lifted into bed. 
The wanderings in the moonlight, after which likewise she could not 
find her way back to bed, may be similarly explained, though I 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 25 

learned only this much about her dancing in the moonlight, that in 
her childhood she was very fond of dancing, which is also the 
case with our patient. Perhaps she wished also to play elves in the 
moonlight, according to poems or fairy tales or had, like her daugh- 
ter, earned the special love of her parents through her skill in 
dancing. 

We are now at the chief problem. How is it then that the night's 
rest, the guarding of which is always the goal of the dream, is 
motorially broken through in sleep walking ? There is first a special 
organic disposition, which is absent from no sleep walker, a height- 
ened motor stimulability. 11 This appears clearly with children, and 
so for example with our patient as a tendency to convulsive attacks, 
pavor nocturnus and terrifying dreams, from which she starts up. 

As far as my observations go, it seems to me that there is a 
special disposition to sleep walking in the descendants of alcoholics 
and epileptics, of individuals with a distinctively sadistic character, 
finally of hysterics, whose motor activity is strongly affected, who 
also suffer with convulsions, tremor, paralyses or contractures. It 
should be merely briefly mentioned that the heightened motor ex- 
citability also establishes a disposition to a special muscle erotic, 
which in fact was easily demonstrable in every one of the cases of 
sleep walking and moon walking which have become known to me. 
The disturbance of the night's rest was made desirable through the 
satisfaction of the muscle erotic to every one for whom the ex- 
cessive muscular activity offered an entirely specialized pleasure, 
even sexual enjoyment. 

Moreover in our case a series of features besides those already 
mentioned bear undoubted testimony to the abnormally increased 
muscle erotic. I have already elsewhere discussed them in detail 12 
and will here merely name briefly the chief factors. The patient had 
an epileptic alcoholic grandfather on the mother's side, who was 
notorious when under the influence of alcohol for his cruelty and 
pleasure in whipping. She had, besides a strongly sadistic mother, 
two older brothers, of whom the elder was frightfully violent and 
brutal, often choking his brothers and sisters, while the other found 
an actually diabolical pleasure in destroying and demolishing every- 
thing. Our patient exhibited already at two years old as well as 
through her whole life a pleasure in striking blows, and also con- 

11 Cf. with this Krafft-Ebing, /. c. " Slight convulsions or cataleptic mus- 
cular rigidity sometimes precede the attacks." 

12 Cf. note 6, p. 163. 



26 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

versely a special pleasure in receiving them, further at four years 
old an intensive delight in dancing, an enjoyment that was unmis- 
takably sexual. We have learned above how she delighted to press 
herself upon her mother's body or twine herself about her legs. 
Moreover, finally, one of her very earliest hysterical symptoms was 
a paralysis of the arm. 

More difficult seems to me the answer to the second main ques- 
tion : What influence does the moon exercise upon the sleeper ? It 
was earlier discussed, along with the various psychical overdeter- 
minations, that the moonlight awoke first the infantile pleasure 
memories, among other things that that light shining everywhere 
lighted the way which led to the house and the dwelling of the 
earliest childhood. Mention was made of the infantile comparison 
of the moon's disk with the childish nates and perhaps the gazing 
upon the nightly orb, which seems besides most like a hypnotic 
fixation, may be also referred back to the same. Since we know 
today that the love transference constitutes the essential character 
of hypnotism, that symptom brings us once more to the eroticism. 
Beside there was not wanting with our patient a grossly sensual 
relationship. Finally there is also the infantile desire to climb over 
the houses into the moon, realizing itself in part at least in the moon- 
inspired climbing upon the roof. 

Yet the second leading problem appears to me, in spite of all 
this, not completely exhausted. It might not thus be absolutely 
ruled out that more than a mere superstition lurks behind the folk 
belief which conceives of a " magnetic " influence by which the moon 
attracts the sleeper. Such a relationship is indeed conceivable when 
we consider the motor overexcitability of all sleep walkers and the 
effecting of ebb and flow through the influence of the moon. Fur- 
thermore no one, in an epoch which brings fresh knowledge each 
year of known and unknown rays, can deny without question any 
influence to the rays of moonlight. Perhaps in time the physicist 
and the astronomer will clear up the matter for us. Meanwhile the 
question is raised and can be answered only with an hypothesis. 

In conclusion I have in mind a last final connection which the 
spell of the moon bears to belief in spirits and ghosts. It is estab- 
lished through many analyses that the visits of the mother by night 
form the basis of the latter, when she comes with the light in her 
hand and scantily clothed in white garments, nightgown, or chemise 
and petticoat, to see if the children are asleep or, if they are, to set 
a child upon the chamber. The so often mentioned " woman in 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 27 

white " may also be the maiden in her nightgown, who thus exhibits 
hereself in her night garment to her parents as she climbs into their 
bed, later also eventually to her lover. The choice of the hour be- 
tween twelve and one, which came to be called the ghostly hour, may 
perhaps be referred to the fact that at this time sleep was most pro- 
found and therefore there was least danger of discovery. 

Case 2. I introduce here a second case, in which to be sure the 
influence of the moon represented only an episode and therefore re- 
ceived also but a brief analysis. It is that of a twenty-eight year old 
forester, who came under psychoanalytic treatment on account of a 
severe hysterical cardiac distress. The cause of this was a damming 
up of his feelings toward his mother, for whom he longed in the 
unconscious. His condition of anxiety broke out when he went to 
live with his mother after the death of his father and slept in the 
next room. He admitted that his father drank. Every Sunday he 
was somewhat drunk. Likewise the mother, who kept a public 
house, was in no way disinclined toward alcohol. He himself had 
consumed more beer especially in his high school days than was 
good for him. I would emphasize in his sexual life, as belonging to 
our theme, his strong urethral erotic, which made him a bed wetter 
in childhood, led in later years to frequent micturition at night and 
caused a serious dysuria psychica. His muscle erotic finally drove 
him to the calling of a forester. 

Only the portions of his psychoanalysis, which lasted for eight 
weeks, which have to do with his sleep activities and his response*. 
to the moon will be brought forward. Thus he relates at one time ~ 
"At thirteen years old, when I was in a lodging house kept by a 
woman, I arose one morning with the dark suspicion that I had done 
something in the night. What I did not remember. I merely felt 
stupefied. Suddenly the boys who slept with me began to laugh, 
for from under my bed ran a stream of urine. In the night the full 
moon had shone upon my bed. We fellows had no vessel there but 
had to go outside, which with my frequent need for urination during 
the night was very unpleasant. Now there stood under my bed a 
square box for hats and neckties, which I, as I got up in the night 
half intoxicated with sleep, had taken for a chamber and I had 
urinated in it. This was repeated. Another time, also at full moon„ 
I wet a colleague's shoe. They all said that I must be a little loony.. 
When the full moon came, I was always afraid that I might do this 
again, an anxiety which remained long with me. I never dared 
sleep, for example, so that the full moon could shine directly upou 



28 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

me. Yes; still something else. Two or three years later the fol- 
lowing happened, only I do not know whether there was moonlight. 
I was sleeping with several colleagues in a room adjoining that of 
the lodging house keepers, the man and his wife. I must have gone 
into them at night and done something sexual. Either I wished to 
climb into bed with the wife or I had masturbated, I do not know 
which. I had at any rate the next day the suspicion that something 
of the kind had happened. The landlord and landlady laughed so 
oddly, but they said nothing to me." 

" Did your mother perhaps in your childhood come to look after 
you with the light ? " — " Yes ; that is so. My mother always stayed 
up for a long time and came in regularly late at night with the light 
to go to bed. My father was obliged to go early to bed because of 
his work and had to get up at midnight, when he always made a 
light." Here he suddenly broke off : " Perhaps it is for this reason 
that I have an anxiety in an entirely dark room. If there is not at 
least a bit of light I can not perform coitus." — How is that ? " — " I 
have remonstrated rather seriously with myself that the sexual act 
could be performed only with a light." — Then at a later hour of 
analysis : " When my father went away at night, I came repeatedly 
into my mother's bed. I lay down in my father's bed, also in a 
certain measure put myself into his place." — " Did your mother call 
you, or did you come of yourself?" — I believe that my mother in- 
vited me to her. Now something occurs to me: The moonlight 
awoke me as my father woke me when he struck a light as he was 
going out. Then it was time to go into bed with my mother, for 
the father was gone, which always gave me a feeling of reassur- 
ance." — " Yes, when he was gone he could do nothing more to the 
another. And they you could take his place with her." 

Two months later came the following to supplement this : " Al- 
ready in the grammar school I was always afraid someone might 
attack me in the night, because of which I always double locked the 
room and looked under the bed and in every chest. In childhood 
Mother came in fact to look after me and set me on the chamber." — 
"Then your neurotic anxiety presumably signifies the opposite, the 
wish that your mother shall come to you again " — " Or rather, I bolt 
the door so that my father cannot come to my mother. I followed in 
this also a command of my mother, ' Lock yourself in well ! ' She 
always had a fear of burglars. Now even since I have been living 
with my mother she has said to me more than once, that I should 
lock myself in well. But I thought to myself, 'What, bolt myself 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 20, 

in ! ' — " That would mean also that if the mother wants to come, only 
she should come." — "That is just what I thought to myself, when 
Mother woke me early, that she need not knock but come right in. 
In the daytime I lay in my mother's bed because her room was 
warmer than mine. I was feeling very wretchedly at that time 
and my mother said in the evening, ' Stay there where you are ; I 
will- sleep in the little room next. Leave the door open. 5 In the 
night I know I was very restless." — " Did you not perhaps have the 
wish that your mother should look at her sick child in the night, as 
she once did when you were younger?"' — "Yes, to be sure. This 
wish pursued me and therefore I slept badly. I would have carried 
the thing out further if my dysuria had not hindered me. If I had 
arisen in the night or the morning, then Mother would at once have 
heard me in her light sleep and I would not have been able to urinate. 
One time I crept out of bed very quietly so that she did not hear 
me, and yet it held back a long time until I couldn't stand it any 
longer. It w T as just the same at the time when I was in the gram- 
mar and the high school, if Mother asked me to sleep near her 
and Father was not there. Then also I could urinate only with 
great difficulty. And now when I was living with my mother, I 
had the most severe excited attacks. There was no other reason 
for I was neither a loafer nor a drunkard. I have laid myself down 
in my mother's bed and been unwilling to get out. That is very 
significant. And if at any time I went away from home I at once 
felt so miserable that I must go back. I was immediately better 
when once there." 

This case, when we consider it, is plain in its relationships. The 
excessive love for the mother is a decisive factor as well as the de- 
sire to play the role of the father with her. Therefore the fear of 
burglars at night, behind which hides in part the anxiety that the 
father would have sexual relations with the mother and in part the 
wish that the latter might herself come to him. Joined to this is the 
desire for all sorts of infantile experiences, such as the mother's 
placing him every night upon the chamber because of his bed wet- 
ting. In the later repression the pleasure in the enuresis as well as 
in the being taken up by the mother becomes a dysuria psychica. 
Naturally to the urethral eroticist in childhood, and also later un- 
consciously, micturition is analogous to the sexual act. In puberty 
the moonlight awakens him as in childhood the mother's light or 
that of the father. So on the one hand the memory of the former 
is awakened, who with the light in her hand reminded him to go to 



30 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

the chamber, 13 and on the other hand the memory of the going out 
of the father, which was a signal to him to go to his mother. He 
arises and carries out with her symbolically the sexual act, for he 
urinates into a vaginal symbol (box or shoe-vagina). Also the fact 
that he got up once by the. light of the full moon and wanted to 
climb into the bed of the landlady, likewise a mother substitute, is 
all of a piece. This case here before us, as may be seen, confirms 
what the first has already taught us. 

Cases 3, 4, and 5. — I wish to give further a brief report of three 
cases of walking by moonlight, which I regret to say I could only 
briefly outline in passing, not being able to submit them to an ex- 
haustive analysis. In everything they confirm every detail of our 
previous conclusions. 

The first case is that of an unmarried woman of twenty-eight, 
who walked in her sleep first in her sixth year and the second time 
when she was nine years old. " I got up when the full moon was 
shining, climbed over a chair upon the piano and intended to go to 
the window to unfasten it. Just then my father awoke and struck 
me hard on my buttocks, upon which I went back and again fell 
asleep. I often arose, went to each bed, that of the parents and 
those of the brothers and sisters, looked at them and went back 
again. Between sixteen and seventeen years old, when my periods 
first occurred, the sleep walking stopped." She adds later : " I fre- 
quently as a child spoke out in my sleep. My nose began to bleed 
when I was walking on the street and the sun shone upon me. After 
this the sleep walking improved. I always clung affectionately to 
my parents and brothers and sisters, and never received a blow ex- 
cept in that one instance by my father." — "Which you took rather 
as a caress, than as a blow for punishment." 

In this case also the sleep walker plays sometimes the role of 
the mother, who satisfies herself that her dear ones are asleep. 
Moreover a period of talking in the sleep precedes the wandering 
by moonlight. It is noteworthy that the sleep walking is intercepted 
by a caressing blow from the father and ceases altogether when 
menstruation sets in. Also earlier nosebleed had a beneficial effect. 

The second case is that of a forty-year-old hysteric, who in her 
marriage remained completely anesthetic sexually, although her hus- 
band was thoroughly sympathetic to her and very potent. Her 
father's favorite child, she strove in vain in early childhood for the 

13 In Rumania the folk belief prevails that children readily wet them- 
selves in full moonlight. (Told by a patient.) 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 3 1 

affection of the mother, who on her part also suffered severely 
from hysteria, with screaming fits, incessant tremor of the head and 
hands and a host of nervous afflictions. This mother's daughters 
had all of them always an extraordinary passion for muscular ac- 
tivity with apparently great satisfaction in it. They were among 
other things distinguished swimmers and enthusiastic dancers. My 
patient besides could never tire of walking for hours at a time. 

In our discussion she related the following to me concerning her 
sleep walking : " I got up once in the night when I was about ten 
years old. I had dreamed that I was playing the piano. I found 
myself however not in bed but standing between a chest and a desk 
scratching upon the latter with my nails, as if playing the piano, 
which finally awoke me. There was also a paper basket there which 
either I had stepped over or there was a space through which I could 
slip, at any rate the way there was not quite free. I stood in this 
narrow space and dreamed I was playing the piano. Suddenly I 
heard my mother's voice, ' Mizzi, where are you ? ' She called me 
several times before I finally awoke. Without it was not yet grow- 
ing daylight, but the moon shone brightly within. I recollected my- 
self immediately, realizing where I was, and went beck to bed. I 
told my mother, as an excuse, that I had to go to the chamber." 
" Had you at that time a great desire to play the piano ? " — " Three 
years later it made me sick that I had not had to learn, but then I 
had as yet no desire for music. We had no piano at that time. Yet 
among my earliest memories is that of the way in which my mother 
played the piano. As a woman I wished that I could express my 
joy and sorrow in music. I would mention further that my brother 
and my uncle on the mother's side 14 are both sleep walkers. The 
former always wants to come into my bed in the night when he 
walks in his sleep. I must emphasize that he is especially fond 
of me. 

"The following often happened to me after I was married but 
never in my maidenhood. I awoke in the night, sat up in bed and 
did not know what was the matter with me. I could not think con- 
sciously, I was quite incapable of thought. I knew neither where I 
was nor what was happening to me ; I could remember nothing. I 
did not know whether I was Jew or Christian, man or woman, a 
human being or a beast, only stared straight ahead into the next 
room, at a point of light. That was the only thing that appeared 

14 They are both passionately devoted to sports, thus also endowed with a 
heightened muscle erotic 



32 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

clear to me. I held myself to it to regain clearness. I always said 
to myself : ' What, what then ? Where, how and why ? ' My 
powers of thought went no further. I was like a newborn child. I 
stared fixedly at this point of light because I unconsciously thought 
I would obtain clearness there for everywhere else it was dark. 
This lasted for a long time until through the light I could distinguish 
what it was that caused the light. It was from a street lamp, so 
apparently before midnight, and the lamp lighted a bit of the wall 
in the next room. After I had said to myself for a long time ' What, 
what ? ' and stared straight at that light, I learned gradually to dis- 
tinguish what made the light, that is to recognize, That there 
above, is a bit of lamplight ; again after some time ; That is my 
lamp. Upon this I recollected my home and then for the first time 
everything else. When I had made out the outlines of things around 
me, then returned the consciousness that I was a human being and 
was married. Of all that I had not before been aware. I do not 
remember that I had dreamed anything before this came on, or 
that anything had excited me, nor that anything special had hap- 
pened beforehand. Beside nothing like it has ever happened to me 
when I have been greatly excited. At the most, after my marriage 
I led a life of strain. I was tied to a shop which was damp, un- 
wholesome and full of bad air, and I am a friend of fresh air. I 
suffered very much mentally under these conditions, because I love 
light and air." — " Did you think that you were indeed not a human 
being ? " — " No ; only that with God's help I would endure this life." 
I will add here that her second sister also manifested similar dis- 
turbances of consciousness. 

We find first in the foreground a family disposition to sleep 
walking and moon influence. The brother significantly always wants 
in his wanderings to get into the sister's bed, while our patient her- 
self openly plays the part of mother, especially the mother of the 
earliest childhood. It is interesting also that when in her married 
life she had to give up her pleasure in light and air, the disturbances 
of consciousness set in, from which she could free herself only 
through fixing her attention upon a point of light. She had the dis- 
tinct feeling that from this point of light things would become clear 
to her. One can easily think of occasions of being dazed by sleep 
when perhaps the mother came with the candle in her hand to see 
whether her child was asleep and the child awoke. The whole re- 
markable occurrence would then be simply a desire for the mother's 
love, which she all her life long so sorely missed. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 33 

Now for the last case, a twenty-three year old married woman 
suffering from a severe hysteria, who clung with great tenderness to 
her parents, but received a reciprocal love only from her father, 
while the mother preferred her sister. The patient told me of her 
moon walking : " I always wanted to sleep by the open blinds so that 
the moon could shine upon me. My oldest brother walked about in 
the night, drank water, went to the window and looked out, all of 
course in his sleep, then he went back to bed and slept on. At the 
same time he spoke very loudly, but quite unintelligible things and 
one could actually observe that the moon exercised an attraction 
over him. My younger healthy brother said that it was frightful, the 
many things that he uttered in the night. I also climbed out of bed 
one night when sixteen or seventeen years old, because I could not 
find the moon, and sought it and met my moon haunted brother. I 
immediately disappeared again going back to my bed and he did 
not see me. 

"I was ill once, about the same time, with influenza, and con- 
tinually repeated in my feverish phantasies that they should take 
down some one who was hanged and not punish him; he could not 
help it. There was moonlight at that time and moreover a light 
burned in the room. I took this for the moon, which I could not see 
but wanted to see. I strove only all the time to see the moon. The 
windows must be closed because I was afraid, but the blinds must 
remain open so that I could see the moon. Some one roused me 
then from my phantasies and there I saw that my cousin sat near 
me. He was not however the one hanged, it was some one who was 
first dragged out by another man, a warden in the prison. The face 
of the one who was hanging I did not see, only his body." — " Of 
whom did he remind you?" — "I do not know definitely and yet 
it was the cousin who sat near me. And as I awoke, apparently I 
called his name for he answered me, ' Yes, here I am ! ' — " What 
about the warden of the prison ? " — " A man is first locked up before 
he is hanged." — " Do you see also in phantasy something that hangs 
down?" — "Yes; when with my cousin I always had the desire to 
see his membrum stiff, as it could be felt and noticed outlined 
through his clothing." I will add likewise that behind the cousin 
and her sexual wishes toward him analogous phantasies toward the 
father were hidden. That which hangs down (pendens, penis) is 
also the phallus. Her adjuration that the hanged person should not 
be punished, he could not help it, is a demand for mercy for sexual 
sins (see also later). 



34 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

"Upon the wedding journey my husband did not want to sleep 
by the open blinds, and I wanted to sleep nowhere else so that the 
moon could shine upon me. I could never sleep otherwise, was very 
restless and it was always as if I wanted to creep into the moon. I 
wanted, so to speak, to creep into the moon out of sight. 15 Re- 
cently I was out in the country with my sister and slept by the open 
blinds. The light from the heavens, to be sure not the moonlight, 
forced its way in and I had the feeling as if something pierced me, 16 
in fact it pierced me somehow in the small of my back, and I arose 
with my eyes closed and changed the position of the bed, upon which 
I slept well. I knew nothing of it that I had arisen, but something 
must have happened because I now could lie comfortably. 

" Something else still. About two years ago I observed the moon 
in the country, as it was reflected in the water, and I could not tear 
myself from this spectacle until I was suddenly awakened "by my 
husband and cried out. Five or six years ago I went out in a boat 
upon the Wolfgang lake. The moon was reflected in the water and 
I sat there very still. Suddenly my brother, the one who is well, with 
whom I do not have much to do, asked, 'What are you thinking 
of?' — 'Nothing at all.' — 'It must be something/ — 'No, nothing!' 
As we climbed out, I was still quite absent minded. Also at night I 
always had the moon before me and spoke with it." — " Consciously 
or in a dream ? " — " I believe I was more asleep than awake. For if 
any one had come upon me then I should have felt it very pain- 
fully. I have incidentally noted the words : ' Oh moon with thy white 
face, thou knowest I am in love only with thee. Come down to me. 
I languish in torture, let me only comfort myself upon thy face. 
Thou enticing, beautiful, lovely spirit, thou torturest me to death, 
my suffering rends me, thou beautiful Moon, thou sweet one, mine, 
I implore thee, release me from this pain, I can bear it no longer. 
Ah, what avail my words and my complainings ! Be thou my hap- 
piness, take me with thee, only pleasure of the senses do I desire 
for myself. Thou Moon, most beautiful and best, save me, take my 
maidenhood, I am not evil to thee. Draw me mightily to thyself, 
do not leave off, thy kisses have been so good to me.' " As may be 
seen, she loved the moon like a lover to whom she would yield her- 
self entirely. The grossly sexual relationship is evident. It is after 
this fragment doubly regrettable that a penetrating psychoanalysis 
was not here possible. 

The early sexual content of the moon desire and its connection 

15 Phantasy of the mother's body? The moon's disk = the woman's body? 

16 A clear coitus phantasy. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 35 

with the parent complex is shown by her further statement : " Last 
summer in the country I had only my mother-in-law with whom I 
could talk. It was the time of the new moon and I could not bear 
complete darkness in my room. It was frightfully lonely to me thus 
and I could not sleep. I had the idea that in the lonely darkness 
someone was coming to me and I was afraid." 

It soon came to light that she and her sister in their early child- 
hood and again between the ages of eight and thirteen shared the 
parents' sleeping room and had repeatedly spied upon their sexual 
intercourse. Her present fear is also evidently the wish to put her- 
self in the place of the mother, to whom the father comes. She re- 
calls yet one more episode : ' When I was nine or ten years old, the 
healthy brother was ill with typhoid and the parents were up nights 
on his account. We sisters were sent to stay elsewhere, where we 
had opportunity to play with a boy who carried on a number of 
sexual things with us. I then dreamed of him at night and phan- 
tasied the sexual things which I had done with him in the daytime. 
Apparently I had also at that time played underneath with my geni- 
tals. At the same time, while my brother had typhoid, I was unwill- 
ing to go to sleep and could not, because I could have no rest while 
my brother was ill." It is clear without further discussion to one 
who understands these things that it was not anxiety for the brother 
but secret, yet insistent sexual wishes which caused the sleepless- 
ness. It is finally significant that, when later she dreamed of a 
burglar, he always came after her with a knife, or choked her, as 
her cousin and mother had often done to her. 

As we consider this third case of moon affectivity we find 
again familiar phenomena, connections with early sexual dreams 
and the parent complex. Especially noteworthy is further her 
direct falling in love with the moon, to which she addresses her 
adoration in verses and to which she even offers her virginity. It 
is as if she saw in it a man, who should free her from her sexual 
need. One is reminded how in the first case, the one cured by psy- 
choanalysis, the four-year-old girl sought continually the moon's 
face on the ground of a students' song. It could not, we regret to 
say, be ascertained, in the absence of a psychoanalysis, whether in 
this case the heavenly body represented to the moon walker some 
definite person or not. 

Case 6. — I add here three autobiographical reports, which I 
have gathered from literature. The first originates with the 
famous anatomist and physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach, who 
from his tenth to his thirtieth year had occasional attacks of moon 



36 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

walking, although he apparently "enjoyed the most perfect health." 
"I have during these periods," he himself relates, "undertaken 
actions which I had to recognize as mine, merely because they could 
have been carried out by no one else. Thus one day it was incom- 
prehensible to me why I had on no shirt when I awoke, and it re- 
mained so in spite of my utmost efforts to recollect myself, until the 
shirt was found in another room rolled together under a press. In 
my twenty-ninth year I was awakened from a night wandering by 
the question, What did I want? and then the consciousness of the 
somnambulistic state passed over in part to the awaking. First I 
found the question strange, but since I thought the reason for it 
would become plain, I need not betray it. Immediately, however, 
as I began to waken, I asked myself in what that consisted and, 
now that the somnambulistic state was over, the answer must be 
due me." 

One cannot help finding this self revelation exceedingly interest- 
ing. The hiding of the shirt, although the affair is so incompletely 
reported, especially in its motivation, points unmistakably at least to 
exhibitionism. The second sleep walking appears much more diffi- 
cult of explanation. In this Burdach sought plainly a definite 
goal, which seemed so clear and transparent to him that he could 
not at all understand why anyone should question him about it. If 
we consider that his first thought on waking was that he need not 
betray this purpose, that moreover there enters at once a repression 
and causes him completely to forget it, there remains then no other 
possibility than that we have to do with a strongly forbidden wish, 
which the conscious censor will not allow to pass. It is easy to con- 
ceive a sexual motivation in this second instance if we remember 
. that in the first sleep walking something sexual surely took place. 

Still more probable is the strongly forbidden sexual goal, if we 
take into consideration the circumstances of his life. In his auto- 
biography "Riickblick auf mein Leben" Burdach tells us how ex- 
traordinarily his mother depended upon him. "Having already 
lost four children in their first year, she had longed to bear another 
child and especially since the setting in of the illness of my father 
had compelled her to think of losing him, she had wished for a son 
as a sure object for her love- thirsty heart. Her wish was fulfilled 
when she bore me." Eleven months later the father died, leaving 
his wife and his little son not yet a year old unprovided for. Never- 
theless she, the widow, rejected the proposal to return to her parents' 
home and preferred rather "trouble, need and a thousand cares 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 37 

upon herself in order that I might be better educated ; for I was the 
object of her deepest love. About nine o'clock in the evening she 
went with me to bed and twined her arm about me ; in the morning 
she stole from my side and permitted me an hour or two more of 
rest (p. 14). 

"Women had a particular influence upon me; but it was also 
natural to me to attach myself to them. As my mother related, I 
never as a child went for a ride on my hobby horse without having 
at parting and on my return kissed my hand to my lady represented 
by a doll" (p. 24). It is superfluous to add that this lady was no 
other than his mother. Also the following passage I think is sig- 
nificant : " I was by nature endowed with as great a sensitiveness to 
womanly charm as to womanly dignity and this inclination toward 
the other sex grounded in my psychical constitution was nurtured by 
circumstances from my earliest youth on. I could but recognize very 
soon the high intellectual and moral quality of my good mother, who 
in her struggle with poverty kept herself fresh and free from vul- 
garity and shunned no sacrifice for me. Likewise the matrons to 
whose well wishing I owe my gratitude, inspired me with high 
respect for their character. In my former nurse there seemed to 
me a pattern of tireless and sagacious activity of a high order and 
breeding. . . . Thus a high respect for true womanhood was im- 
planted in me. On the other hand I was as a boy made so accus- 
tomed to this role by several young women, who entertained them- 
selves with me and considered me as their lover to while away their 
time, that I later retained the inclination to play this part and con- 
sidered a friendly advance as an invitation which I in turn held as 
a sacred claim of honor and an agreeable duty" (pp. 69 ft.). 

When later the mother took a young widow into lodgings, the 
young man, then twenty-one years old, had "the exalted feeling of 
being her protector. Then it was all up with my heart" (p. 71). 
The death of the dearest one to him on earth, his mother, followed 
close upon this and brought an end to it. " I became convinced 
that happiness would be found for me only where I shared it with 
another being, and that I could be satisfied only by a relationship 
similar to that in which I had stood toward my mother; an inner bond 
where only a single mutual interest controlled, where one soul found 
its happiness only in the other. Without such an absolute love, 
penetrating the whole being, life seemed to me worthless and stale. 
My mother, whose unbounded love I had enjoyed, was torn from 
me; my excellent uncle, heartily devoted to me, I saw in the enjoy- 



38 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

merit of his own family happiness. And an unconquerable desire 
for the same happiness tortured me as I felt my utter loneliness " (p. 
79). So he concluded to marry although he had only limited pros- 
pects for supporting a family. 

" The first intimation that my wife was pregnant filled me with 
delight. I took it for granted that Heaven would send me a daugh- 
ter. With my idea of the value of woman all my wishes tended 
thither, to possess a daughter and to be able to watch over her while 
she unfolded to a noble womanhood. She should have my mother 
for her pattern and therefore also be named Caroline after her. 16a I 
spoke so confidently, after I had left Vienna, of ' our daughter 
Caroline ' in my letters to my wife that she was finally quite con- 
cerned and sought to prepare me for the birth of a son. I had not 
however made a mistake and my confidence was in the end jus- 
tified" (pp. 83 fi\). His wife was confined at some distance from 
him and then as soon as possible journeyed to him with the little 
one. He relates as follows : " I went in Borsdorf with a beating 
heart to the carriage which brought her to me, kissed her hastily, took 
my child out of her arms and carried it hastily into the inn, laid it 
upon the table, loosed the bindings which bound it to its tiny bed and 
was lost in happy contemplation of the beautifully formed, lovely, 
vigorous and lively little girl and then first threw myself into the 
arms of my wife, who in her mother's pride and joy was feasting 
her eyes upon us, and then I had again to observe the lovely child. 
What cared I for mankind ! What cared I for the whole world ! I 
was more than happy" (pp. 85 ff.). 

The manner also in which he brought up his child is highly sig- 
nificant : " Our hearts clung mostly to our daughter. ... I en- 
joyed the pleasure of possessing her with full consciousness of her 
worth, gazed upon her with rapture and was delighted when I ob- 
served in her a new trait of beautiful womanly character. She 
recognized by my serious treatment of her the entire depth of my 
love, repaid it with inner devotion and challenged it with merry 
playfulness. From her first year I delighted to lift her from her 
bed in the morning and even when she was eight years old she often 
got up of herself, knocked on the window of the alcove door leading 
into my work room and whisked back to her bed, so that when I 

16a Ci . Barrie : " Dear Brutus," Act. II. for the dream daughter, who bears 
the name of the author's mother. See also " Margaret Ogilvy." The dream 
daughter's apostrophe to the moon is also interesting in connection with the 
present study. Tr. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 39 

came she could throw herself with hearty laughter into my arms and 
let me take her up. Or she slipped behind my chair and climbed up 
behind my back, while I was deep in my work, so that she could fall 
triumphantly upon my neck. 

" I must refrain from mentioning more of her winsome child- 
hood. She was the most beautiful ornament of my life and in the 
possession of her I felt myself, in spite of all pecuniary need, im- 
measurably happy." It will not surprise any one with knowledge 
of these things that a child so insatiable for love should become 
hysterical. "Her sensitiveness was unnaturally exaggerated," also 
she was seized once with a hysterical convulsion, as Burdach relates. 
She died young and " the flower of my life was past. The fairest, 
purest joy was extinguished for me. I had wished her for myself 
and Heaven had heard me. Finding in her the fulfilment of my 
warmest wishes, I had never thought it would be possible that I 
should outlive this daughter. Nevertheless I bore the pain . . . 
confident of being reunited with her. . . . For thirty years scarcely 
a day has passed on which I have not at least once thought in my 
inmost soul of my Caroline" (pp. 142-147). 

I will cite in conclusion still one more fragment of self charac- 
terization : " A chief trait in my character was the need for love, not 
that everyday love which limits itself to a personal pleasure and de- 
light, but that unbounded, overflowing love which feels itself com- 
pletely one with the beloved. . . . The ideal of marriage was before 
me in youth, for this need for love has been mine all my life. ... I 
remember as a student having written in my diary that I would 
rather forego life itself than the happiness of family life " (pp. 

53*). 

The center of this interesting life is Burdach's deep oneness with 
his mother. She on her part took him from the beginning uncon- 
sciously as a sexual object, as a substitute for her husband, who 
was failing in health and soon after died. She lay in bed near her 
little one, her arm twined about his body and slept with him until 
morning. No wonder that the boy was so sensitive to womanly 
charm and likewise that later different women looked upon him as 
their lover. The thought early established itself with Burdach that 
only such a relationship could satisfy him as that in which he had 
stood toward his mother. And as he stood for the father it seemed 
to him a certain fact that now a little girl should come to be the sur- 
rogate for his mother. Noteworthy also is his attitude toward the 
mother who had just been confined and the child. The former is to 

4 



40 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

him almost incidental, while in the contemplation of his child, in 
whom he secures his mother again, he can scarcely get his fill, and 
he overwhelms her later with such passionate love as he had once 
obtained from his mother. When the girl was torn from him, he 
was consoled only by the thought of being united again with her in 
heaven. 

We may see finally in the fond play in bed with his daughter a 
repetition of that which he carried on with his mother, and we may 
remember also, that as a child he always slept with his mother. 
From all this it seems to me a light falls upon the unexplained pur- 
pose of Burdach's sleep walking. If this seems completely clear to 
him but so objectionable that he not only concludes to keep it secret, 
but, more than that, forgets it on the spot, then the probability is, 
that he desired that night to climb into bed with his beloved mother. 

Case 7. A second autobiographical account of repeated sleep 
walking I find in the " Buch der Kindheit," the first volume of Lud- 
wig Ganghofer's " Lebenslauf eines Optimisten." When the boy 
had to go away to school his mother gave him four balls of yarn to 
take with him, so that he might mend his own clothing and under- 
wear. She had hidden a gulden deep within each ball, a proof of 
mother love, which he later discovered. In the course of time while 
at the school the impulses of puberty began to stir in him and pressed 
upon him so strongly at first that frequent pollutions occurred. He 
thought he must surely be ill, until finally a colleague explained to 
him that this was on the contrary a special sign of health. This 
calmed him and now he could sleep splendidly. 

" One night I awoke suddenly as if roused by a burning heat. 
I experienced a horrible suffering and believed I felt a hand on my 
body. I cried out and pushed with my feet, and as I lay there in a 
half consciousness it was as if many of my dormitory companions 
were awake and I heard them ask, ' What is it ? Who has called out 
this way ? ' A voice, * Some one has been dreaming ! ' And another 
voice, ' Silence in the dormitory ! ' And all was gone from me as if 
under a heavy veil. Once again quiet. Am I asleep or am I awake ? 
A wild beating in the arteries of my neck, a roaring in my ears. 
Yet in the dormitory all is quiet. The lamp is burning, I see the 
white beds. I see the copper of the washstand glimmer like red 
gold. Must I have dreamed — an oppressive, frightful dream? 
Drops of sweat stood out on my forehead. Then came a heavy 
sleep. What was this? I rarely had days of depression or restless, 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 4 1 

disturbed nights. And yet in these weeks I entered upon this un- 
comfortable experience. 

" One night I awoke. Darkness was round about me. And I was 
cold. And I saw no lamp, no bed, no shining copper. Was this 
also a dream? Yet my hands felt plainly the hard wood in front of 
me. Slowly I recognized a number of vaguely outlined squares, the 
great windows. Clad only in my shirt, I sat in the study room 
before my desk. Such a horror fell upon me as I cannot describe. 
I ran wildly up the stairs, threw myself into my bed and shook. 
Another night I awoke. Darkness was about me. Again I was 
cold. And I believed that I was again sitting at my desk. No ; I 
was standing. My hands however felt no wood, my eyes found not 
the gray windows. As I moved, my head struck against something 
hard. I became aware of a feeble light shining. As I went towards 
it, I came from some dark room upon the dimly lighted stair landing. 

" I awoke again in the night. I was cold. A semi-darkness was 
about me and over me many stars twinkled. I sat upon the shingle 
roof of the bowling alley. It was not a far leap to the ground 
below. But the pebble stones of the seminary garden pricked my 
bare feet. Moreover, when I wanted to get into the house, I found 
the gate closed. My God! how had I then come out? Somewhere 
I found an open window and climbed into the house and noiselessly 
up to the dormitory. The window near my bed stood open — and 
there outside, I believe, was a lightning rod. 

"All day I racked my brains to find a way to escape from the 
fear of this dreadful thing. I dared not confide in anyone, for fear 
of the ridicule of the others, for fear — I never knew just what E 
feared. In the evening I took one of Mother's balls of yarn to bed! 
with me, bound two double strands about my wrists and tied the 
ends around the knobs of the bedstead. In the night, as I was about 
to wander again, I felt the pull of Mother's threads and awoke. It 
never came again. I was cured." 

This appears at the first glance a non-sexual sleep walking. This 
is only however in its first appearance, although it is to be regretted 
that the full explanation can scarcely be given in the absence of any 
analysis. It is first to be noted that sleep walking sets in at puberty 
and is ushered in by anxiety dreams, pollutions and various anxiety 
equivalents. The hammering in the arteries, the roaring in the ears, 
the restless, disturbed nights, as well as the unusually disturbed 
days, we know these all as manifestations of an unsatisfied libido. 
The first " frightful " anxiety dream seems to lead deeper, as well 



42 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

as the "horrible suffering" started by a hand, which he felt upon 
his body. Must not this hand, which causes this "horrible suffer- 
ing " to the youth who had never yet known trouble, have touched 
his genitals? 17 Behind this perhaps, moreover, are very early 
memories of the care bestowed upon the nursing infant and the 
child. 

The terror which fell upon him every time that he walked in his 
sleep is worthy of note, for he was not otherwise easily frightened. 
" A terror which I could not describe," " fear of that dreadful 
thing" and fear not merely of the ridicule of his fellows but of 
something, what, he never knew, which is a far more violent re- 
action than we have been accustomed to find with sleep walkers. 
This excessive reaction may be very well understood, however, if 
behind it a particularly inacceptable sexual factor hides itself. 
Finally the cure by means of the mother's balls of yarn, homely 
proof of her love, doubtless has to do with the erotic. It must be 
admitted to be sure that we have to confine ourselves to mere con- 
jectures. Only one may well maintain that even an apparently non- 
sexual case soon reveals its sexual grounding. Moreover, a strong 
muscle erotic is demonstrated further throughout Ganghofer's 
autobiography. 

Case 8. I will now, especially upon the subject of moon walking, 
cite an author who shows a very unusual preference for this 
heavenly body. In many a description and in many of the speeches 
which he has put into the mouths of his heroes, has Ludwig Tieck, 
who also has sung of the " moon-lustered magic night," given ar- 
tistic expression to this quite remarkable love mania — this is the 
correct designation for it. Ricarda Huch in her " Bliitezeit der 
Homantik " makes the striking statement that from this poet's 
figures one must "tear away the labels stuck upon them and name 
them altogether Ludwig Tieck, for in truth they are only refrac- 
tions of this one beam." One may hear for example how Sternbald 
felt : " The orb of the moon stood exactly opposite the window of 
his room." He watched it with longing eyes, he sought upon the 
shining disk and in the spots upon it mountains and forests, won- 
derful castles and enchanted flowers and fragrant trees. He be- 
lieved that he saw lakes with shining swans which were drawing 
boats, a skiff which carried him and his beloved, while about them 
charming mermaids blew upon their twisted conchs and stretched 
their arms filled with water lilies over into the bark. 

17 One may also think of the fear of castration, associated with the threats 
of parents so very frequent!} 7 made when children practice masturbation. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 43 

" Ah, there, there ! " he would call out, " is perchance the home of 
all desire, all wishes ; therefore there falls upon us so sweet a melan- 
choly, so soft a charm, when that still light, full and golden, floats 
upon the heavens and pours down its silver light upon us. Yes, it 
awaits us and prepares for us our happiness, and for this reason 
its sorrowful look toward us, that we must still remain in this 
earthly twilight." The similarity here with the phantasies of the 
psychoanalytic patient at the beginning is indeed unmistakable. 

Yet one or two extracts from the novel "Der Mondsuchtige," 18 
the title of which is misleading since it in no way treats of one 
afflicted with lunacy but of a vertable moon lover, presumably our 
poet himself. There the nephew, Ludwig Licht(!), writes to his 
uncle : " It is now three months since I had a very serious quarrel 
with my friend, a quarrel which almost separated us, for he mocked 
at an entire world which is to me so immeasurably precious. In a 
word, he railed at the moon and would not admit that the magic 
light with which it shines was anything beautiful or exalting. 
From Ossian to Siegwart he reviled a susceptibility toward the 
moon although the poets express it, and he almost had declared in 
plain words that if there were a hell, it certainly would be located in 
the moon. At any rate he thought that the entire sphere of the 
moon consists of burned out craters, water could not be found upon 
it, and hardly any plant life, and the wan, unwholesome reflection 
of a borrowed light would bring us sickness, madness, ruin of fruits 
and grains, and he who is already foolish will without doubt behave 
himself worst at the time of full moon. . . . What concern is it of 
mine what the astronomers have discovered in the moon or what 
they will yet discover? ... It may be ludicrous and vexatious to 
devote oneself exclusively and unreservedly to this or that, any 
observation, any favorite object. Upon my earlier wanderings I 
met a rich Englishman who traveled only to waterfalls and battle- 
fields. Ridiculously enough, though I have not journeyed only in 
the moonlight, yet I have from my earliest youth forever taken 
note of the influence of its light, have never in any region missed 
the light of the full moon and I dream of fyeing, not quite an Endy- 
mion, but yet a favorite of the moon. When it returns, its orb little 
by little growing full, I cannot suppress a feeling of longing while 
I gaze upon it, whether in meadow and woodland, on the moun- 
tains or in the city itself and in my own room. ,, 

And the uncle answers him: "It is true, you are moon sick, 

18 Literally, "Moonsick." [Tr.] 



44 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

as we have always called you, and to such a one much must be 
forgiven which would have to be reckoned differently to a well 
man. I have myself however always inclined to this disease." In 
fact the entire action, loving and losing, the development and solu- 
tion of the plot, takes place almost exclusively under the light of 
the moon. At the conclusion, when the hero finds the beloved 
given up for lost, he cannot refrain from the outcry: "Yes, the 
moonlight has given her and led her to me, he, the moon has so 
rewarded me, his true friend and inspired panegyrist ! " I regret 
that I find nothing in the biographies which would explain Tieck's 
exquisite amorousness toward the moon. 



PART II 

Literary Section 

It is my purpose to bring also our beautiful literature to the solu- 
tion of the exceedingly difficult and obscure problem of sleep walk- 
ing and moon walking. Our poets, for all our psychiatrists and psy- 
chologists, possess the finest knowledge of the psyche and during 
the centuries before science was able to throw light upon the puzzles 
of the mind, they solved them prophetically with discerning spirit. 
Thus they knew how to bring to light various elements of our 
problem. Their creations directed to that end arose from their 
own inner nature, through analogy, or because sleep walking was 
not foreign to them themselves. And even if neither were the case, 
they still had the ability of those who have a real true knowledge of 
men, quite intuitively to see clearly into the unconscious of others. 
We will come to know what profound interest many of the great 
poets, like Otto Ludwig and Heinrich von Kleist took in night wan- 
dering and moon walking and how they have first introduced these 
dark problems into other traditional material. A striking similarity 
is revealed if one compares that which the poet has in mind with 
that which I have been able to report in the medical section. I 
shall be able satisfactorily to verify the statement that science and 
art have reached exactly the same result. First however I will pre- 
sent the examples from the poets according to their comprehen- 
sibility and their transparency. I begin with 

"Aebelo," by Sophus Michaelis. 

Twice had Soelver drawn near to the maiden Gro, daughter of 
his neighbor, Sten Basse. The first time was when in the spring he 
visited the island Aebeloe, which belonged to him but was quite un- 
inhabited. So bright the day and so warm the kiss of the sun upon 
him, yet suddenly it was " as if his bare neck were flooded by a still 
warmer wave of light." A maiden stood before him, "who was 
like pure light. The eyes were as if without pupils, without a 
glance ; as she looked it was as if white clouds floated forth out of a 
heavenly blue background. Soelver sprang up and stood face to 
face before her. Her cheeks grew red. Although unknown to each 

45 



46 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

other, they smiled one at the other like two seraphim. Her hands 
opened toward his and before her, as out of her lap, fell the flowers 
which she had gathered. Soelver believed for a moment that it was 
all a dream. He swung his hands into the air and a hand waved 
toward him. He closed his eyes that he might enjoy to the full the 
soft, fleeting impression. It floated over his hand like an incor- 
poreal breath. Was it then a ghostly vision, that wandered there 
at his side!" When however he knew that the maiden near him 
was a living being, then "his lips sank toward her trembling with 
desire, unintentionally and yet irrevocably." At this moment a 
"cloud passed over the sun and the light became at once dulled as if 
a mist had fallen upon all the flowers. Of all this he did not become 
so quickly aware, as that his own checks resounded from a whizzing 
blow." Her face glowed bright with anger and the delicate blue 
veins were swollen on her forehead, while with a scornful look she 
turned her back to him. His blood was however aflame with desire 
for revenge. 

A second time had the young nobleman Soelver sought to satisfy 
his masculine passion, when he surprised Gro bathing upon Aebeloe. 
She however had defended her maidenhood and struck him about 
the head with an old, rusty sword, which she found on the shore, so 
that he sank upon the grass covered with blood. " He felt the pain 
of his wounds with a strange glow of pleasure. The blow had 
fallen upon the hard flint stone within him so that the sparks of 
passion had sprung forth. He loved the maiden Gro. A consum- 
ing passion raged in his blood. In his thoughts he knelt always 
before that ineffaceable image, which struck him to the earth with a 
flame of divine wrath in her eyes." In revenge for the trespass 
committed Sten Basse fell upon Soelver's castle and took the young 
nobleman himself prisoner. 

Wild violence of this sort was indeed familiar to Sten Basse. 
He himself had once taken his wife thus by force. Just as he was 
flattering himself that he had broken her will once for all, she bit 
him in his chin so that the blood gushed forth and she spit his own 
blood into his eyes. He was struck with admiration at such 
strength. He had thought to desert her at once. Now he lifted 
her in his arms, carried her from her father's castle into the stable, 
bound her to his horse and rode forth — to his own home. Their 
marriage had been at first a long series of repetitions of the first 
encounter. In the end she loved him as the horse loves the iron bit 
between his teeth and the spur in his flank. She did not allow her- 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 47 

self to be subdued by the blows which he gave her, but she was the 
weaker and she loved him because he was strong enough to be the 
stronger. An evil fate had taken his sons from him one after the 
other. Therefore he wished to call forth in his only daughter the 
traits of his own blood, his pride, disdainfulness and stiff-necked- 
ness. " She must know neither fear nor weakness ; her will must 
be hardened and her courage steeled like that of a man. When he 
heard that his daughter had been in danger but had saved herself, 
he swore revenge to the perpetrator of the outrage, yet at the same 
time his heart laughed with pride at Gro's fearlessness. He took 
the young nobleman prisoner and rewarded him with heavy and 
tedious torture as penance for his insolence. Yet at the same time 
he delighted himself with the thought of putting his daughter to a 
still more dangerous proof. He wished to see the young-blooded, 
inexperienced birds reach out swinging and scratching in attack and 
defense." 

As if in mockery he gave to the imprisoned youth the passion- 
ately desired Gro to be with him in the dungeon. " She stood there 
as if she had glided into his prison by the flood of light entering in 
and he trembled lest the light would again absorb her into itself." 
He knew not what power forced him to his knees and threw him at 
her feet with a prayer for forgiveness. She had however merely a 
scornful laugh for the man humbling himself in his love and the 
cruelly abusive word, " Creeping worm ! " Then in his sense of 
affront there comes the thought that Gro was given into his power. 
While he tried the walls of his dungeon to ascertain if he was per- 
haps watched, Gro stood and stared out by the aperture through 
which the light entered, now paler than before. Soelver stepped 
near her, drew the single gold ring from his finger, which had come 
down to him through many generations of his forefathers, and ex- 
tended it to her as a bridal gift. But she threw it unhesitatingly 
out through the peephole. 

Now bitterness raged in Soelver's blood. "He bowed himself 
before her face in order to intercept her gaze, but he did not meet it 
though her eyes were directed toward his. It was indeed no glance 
but a depth into which the whole light of day, which was blue now 
without overhead, was drawn down into a deep well. Soelver be- 
came intoxicated with this light, which, as it were, appeared to seek 
her alone and threw an aureole of intangible beauty about her form." 
He crept up and pushed forward the wooden shutter, then carried 
Gro to his cot. " She had let herself go without resistance and fell 



48 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

lifelessly with her arms hanging down. Soelver laid his face close 
to hers. His breath was eager, his blood was on fire and in his 
fierce wrath he intended to yield himself to the boiling heat of sen- 
sual passion. Her cheeks however, her skin, her lips were cold as 
those of death. He began nevertheless wildly to kiss her face, once 
and again, as if to waken warmth and life in the cold skin. Yet 
with every kiss it was as if she grew more fixed, as if the lips 
shriveled and grew cold and damp as ice over the teeth. The cold 
from this embrace crept over Soelver, and drew the heat and fervor 
from his nerves, until he shook suddenly with the cold and shud- 
dered with the thought that he had a corpse under him. Yet in that 
selfsame moment he marked the rising of her breast as she drew in 
her breath, full of strength with all its coldness, so full of strength 
that it pushed Soelver away and he slipped down to the hard flags 
of the floor. 

" Soelver lay upon the floor, congealed with a coldness which 
was stronger than that of the hard tiles. It was as dark as in a 
walled-in grave. He dared not move however for fear that he 
would again feel that ice cold body. 'Hear me/ sounded suddenly 
a strangely shrill whisper, 'hear me, if you are a man, let me get 
out ! Call my father ! I want to get out — make light — give me air 
— I am almost choking — I want to get out ! ' " As Soelver opened 
the shutter again so that the dim shadowy glow of the night could 
enter, he saw Gro " tall and slender in the pale light." " Let me out, 
let me out ! " she begged. " I am afraid here below — not of you — 
but of myself and of the dark — let me out ! " " For the first time 
Soelver heard a soft rhythm in this voice smooth as steel. A soft 
breath breathed itself in her entreaty. He became a man, a pro- 
tector and felt his power grow through her supplication." 

Yet though he exerted himself to the utmost to open the door of 
his dungeon, it was all in vain. It must have been fastened on the 
outside with massive oak or iron bars. So finally he gave up entirely 
and turned back to the opening where the light came in. Gro had 
sunk down under the last bit of light, without complaint, without 
sound. Her eyes were closed, she leaned her head against the sharp 
edge of the aperture and her arms hung down lifelessly. Soelver 
bent over her; her breath was almost inaudible, but irregular and 
did not suggest sleep. Like a thirsty plant she stretched herself out 
of the single airhole of the dungeon that she might seize the last drop 
of light before the darkness extinguished everything. Soelver divined 
that she could not be brought away from this aperture for light." 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 49 

He brought all the skins from the couch, spread them over her, 
pushed them under her body and " solicitously, with infinite careful- 
ness he protected her from the damp floor, while he shoved his arm 
under her for support without ever touching her with his hand. All 
his brutality was gone, all his burning passion. Here she lay before 
him like a delicate sick flower, which must be covered over from the 
cold of night." 

When Soelver awoke the next morning he noticed that one of 
his hands was seized by her, grasped in the unconsciousness of 
sleep and held fast by her long, slender fingers, which clasped them- 
selves about his hand. It was as if her soul clung to him in sleep 
as helper and savior from him himself, from his own brutal sav- 
agery. When Gro however opened her eyes and stared into Soel- 
ver's face, lit up by the sun, she broke out into weeping which could 
not be stilled. " She was terrified at awaking in a cellar hole, into 
the close damp darkness of which she looked, while the face of her 
vanquisher blazed strong in the sunlight before her ; she wept with- 
out understanding or comprehending anything of what had hap- 
pened about her." Perplexed, Soelver bent over her hand and 
kissed it. Then came Sten Basse and saw how uncontrollably Gro 
sobbed. "If you have gone near my daughter," he hissed at the 
young nobleman, "there will be no punishment strong enough for 
you." At this there shot up in Soelver a wild lust for revenge and 
he answered his enemy with irritating coldness : " Yes, I took what 
you gave. You brought her yourself into my presence, you laid her 
yourself in my arms. Now you may take her back again. I spurn 
your daughter for I have not desired her for the honor and keep- 
ing of my house, but only for the entertainment of a night. Take 
her back now ! Take her back ! " 

Nevertheless better treatment was from this time on accorded 
Soelver, which he never for a moment doubted he owed to Gro. As 
he dwelt in his cell upon his phantasies, he suddenly heard her voice 
singing that melancholy song of Sir Tidemand, who tried to lure the 
maiden Blidelille into his boat by vigorous runes written upon roses. 
Blidelille awoke at midnight and knew not what it was that com- 
pelled her. 

" It drew me along to Sir Tidemand 
Whom never mine eyes had seen." 

In vain the foster mother bids them spread velvets and satins 
over her that she might sleep. Notwithstanding she arises sud- 



50 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

denly, dresses herself and goes down to the strand to Sir Tidemand, 
who meets her scornfully. Then she goes into the lake, whither 
Tidemand follows her, seized with heartfelt remorse. 

" For evil the rune on the rose leaf traced 
And evil the work it had wrought, 
That two so noble, of royal grace, 
To ruin and death were brought." 

The woful song trailed itself through Soelver's mind like an 
indistinct dream. Then he believed that he distinguished Gro's step, 
until it was lost in her sleeping room. With his mental vision he 
saw the maiden, as she looked out upon the lake toward Aebeloe. 
She looked away from him, of whose fate she took no thought, but 
gazed fixedly over the sea, which bore upon its bosom a ship with 
silken sails, on whose deck Sir Tidemand stood. "Then Soelver 
was conscious of an infinite weakness in his love toward this pure 
maiden, whom his coarseness had taken into his arms, his desire had 
scorched with its hot breath but who had nevertheless left him be- 
numbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he un- 
derstood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own 
power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. Now he 
comprehended that he must carve mystic runes of passion upon his 
own heart as upon a glowing rose and fling it into the mighty sea of 
feeling, praying it to bring the maiden Gro into his hands." 

Day and night Soelver's thoughts tarried only with Gro. In his 
phantasies "he forced himself through the bolted door, climbed 
sharp angled passage ways and winding staircases and lifted oaken 
beams from barred doors. Without once making a mistake, driven 
by a magic sense of direction, he finally reached Gro's couch, at 
which he saw himself staring with great white eyes, whose pupils 
in the darkness of sleep had as it were glided over to the side. And 
upon the cover of her couch lay her two gleaming arms and the 
fingers of the right hand trembled as if they grasped another in- 
visible hand. In this room Soelver remained until her sleep drew 
him to itself, until the heaving of her breasts drew him down, until 
her fingers entwined themselves with his, until their breath mingled 
and his lids closed before her pure gaze." 

Another time he dreamed that he was upon a vessel, evidently in 
the role of Sir Tidemand. And Gro actually came over the water 
to him like the maiden Blidelille, " with roses like two blood spots 
upon her breast. She had crossed her hands beneath them and 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 5 1 

fastened her pure gaze upon Soelver, so that he was seized with 
terror and, without escaping her look, fled to the lee of the vessel 
to the edge of the ship. Yet Gro steadily drew nearer. Now she 
reached the ship's border and Soelver retreated. Step by step she 
followed him, the painful gaze of her deathly white face absorbed 
by his own. And he withdrew over to the other border, drew back 
until he felt the railing hard behind him. Gro stepped forward 
alone and it was not possible to stop her ; he felt as if she wished to 
press within him like the sped arrow to its goal. Finally, in an in- 
stant, as her garment fluttered against him, he threw himself with 
a loud cry to one side and saw, with a great horror, that Gro went 
forward, through the railing as through air and disappeared on the 
other side in the sea, while Soelver lay moaning upon the deck and 
saw before him only the red roses, which fallen from her breast 
crept like living blood over the ship's planks." 

Was it dream or reality, which he saw when he opened his eyes ? 
" The sun's rays burst forth through a crack in a long, radiant arrow, 
which bored itself into the floor and transfixed as it were something 
red that began to glow." And as Soelver crept nearer his astonish- 
ment grew deeper. " For hard by the vision of red were footprints 
breathed so to speak upon the floor, fine, slender prints, directed 
toward him, no more distinct than if a warm breeze had blown away 
the dampness from the surface of a stone, leaving the outline of a 
foot fixed there." As he now stooped down and with his hand felt 
for the blood red spot, his fingers actually touched "a heavy full- 
blown rose, whose sweet strong odor he drank as if in an intoxica- 
tion of reality." No one had forced his way in through the hatch- 
way, of this he soon convinced himself. Gro must have dropped it 
here while he was spinning dreams about her. 

In the nights which followed "he slept in a kind of hunger to 
feel her physically and tangibly in his arms." Then when it was 
again full moon, he found on awaking, in a spot upon which fell the 
rays of moonlight, a little gold cross, "whose six polished stones 
seemed to radiate moonlight from themselves. It was as if the 
moonlight lay within his hand. He watched the small cross sparkle 
— it was the same that he had seen in dreams upon her rose wreath. 
Gro had been also within his prison." 

He was led out soon after this to be shown to the monk, who had 
come to obtain news of his imprisonment. " In the doorway the 
young nobleman met Gro and drew back, so strong a power seemed 
to irradiate from her living form. She stood in the half twilight, 



52 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

with her white hands and her white neck and forehead, which shone 
as with their own light from out her coal black velvet robe. There 
was a blinding, marvelous reality about her, which drew him like a 
great fragrant flower." As the monk expressed his compassion for 
him, that imprisonment had befallen him, his pride of nobility 
awoke. "What do you say of imprisonment and ill foreboding? 
Know you not then that I am of my free will Sten Basse's guest?" 
This reply astonished even Sten Basse. " He admired the young, un- 
daunted spirit, who found in himself no occasion for pity. Soelver 
stood before Gro, his arms firm at his sides, and breathed deep and 
strong. His eyes drank in the clear light from her hands and face." 
When however Sten Basse sought to approach him in a friendly 
manner, Soelver motioned him back : " As prisoner was I led forth, 
as prisoner I return of my free will. If you wish to make any 
apology to me, you know where my dungeon is to be found." Then 
he went quickly, without turning toward Gro, out of the hall and 
down into his prison. His senses nevertheless had seized that warm, 
radiant picture of the beautiful Gro and transplanted it to the midst 
of his cell. He saw it streaming before his eyes in the shimmering 
light of the cross of moonlight and longed for the clear light of the 
night, that he might go on and make the dream face live. When 
the darkness advanced "he stripped himself naked and allowed the 
air of the summer night to cool his limbs and purify them, before 
he betook himself to his cot. The small cross he laid upon his naked 
breast and watched the moonlight glimmer green and blue from 
every stone " and kissed it thinking of Gro. Then he fell asleep in 
blissful happiness. 

Suddenly however he awoke without any apparent reason, from 
no dream or thought. " He was awake, collected and yet at the 
same time strangely under the control of something that lay outside 
himself, a strange unknown power, which might be either mystical 
or natural. It appeared to him as if the moonlight had been loosed 
from the moon and now floated about in the room like a living 
being. So real seemed this fancy to him that he turned his head 
to one side and was not astonished actually to see a form standing 
in the center of the darkness. A feeling of reverence and awe swept 
over Soelver as little by little he distinguished in the floating folds 
of the moon white garment, the firm outlines of a woman's arms, 
which were crossed beneath a half bared breast, the line of the teeth 
in the open mouth, a flash of white light from Gro's eyes gazing 
with a certain fixed power. 

" Holy Mother of God — it was Gro herself ! 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 53 

" Soelver started upright, frightened at his own movement, for 
he scarcely dared breathe, much less go towards her. He felt his 
nakedness as a crime, even his being awake as a transgression. The 
form glided forward out of the moonlight, the crossed hands sep- 
arated themselves from the breast and Gro pursued her way with 
outstretched hands, feeling her way and yet mechanically sure like 
a sleep walker. 

"Yes, she was walking in her sleep. Soelver recognized it by 
the staring look in her eyes, which gazed through the night as 
through miles of space. Soelver slid noiselessly to the floor in front 
of her, afraid that he would be seen, in deadly terror lest she should 
awaken. For he knew how dreadful it might be to awaken a sleep 
walker and in his excited phantasy he heard already the cry of 
horror and madness which would issue from Gro's mouth if she 
awoke and saw herself in this dark, subterranean depth alone with • 
a naked man as with a demon. It was as if everything in Soelver 
cried out in protective anxiety that Gro should not awaken. He 
crouched beseechingly upon the ground, his whole soul was a sob- 
bing prayer for grace, for instant means of deliverance, now that 
Gro had come to him as if by fate. 

"There came a whispered sound from her open mouth, as her 
lips for a moment sought each other. It was as if she breathed out 
the one word ' Soelver.' This, however, to hear his name spoken, 
made Soelver strong at once. It compelled him to arise from the 
floor, it banished fear from his soul, it made him rejoice in every 
fiber of his being. The next moment her outstretched arm reached 
his hand — he felt the firm, cool skin under his trembling finger tips 
and his face felt the warm breathing of her voice, ' Soelver, Soelver !' 
And driven by some mystic power of will, he forced himself under 
the same hypnotic influence which surrounded her. He compelled 
himeslf to leave the clear broad way of reason and to enter the 
ecstatic, perilous, paths of the sleep walker. He was no longer 
awake. He sought, he touched, he stood before that after which he 
had groped. He was himself driven by a magic power, by a marvel- 
ous single purpose, which must be attained. This whole trans- 
formation took place in him merely because he felt that this was 
the only means of saving her from awaking to consciousness and 
madness. 

" ' Soelver — Soelver ! ' — ' Yes.' — ' Soelver — are you — are you — 
there?' — 'Yes — I — am — here.' — 'Yes — that is you — that is you— I 
feel you.' — 'And you see me?' — 'Yes, I see you.' — 'And you will 
stay with me?' — 'Yes — I will — I will stay with you.' 



54 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

" Soelver answered her in the same whisperings in which she 
breathed out her words. His hands passed over hers with infinite 
carefulness. But finally his arms closed about her neck and he felt 
a marvelous tingling in his finger tips as he touched her soft silken 
hair. His mouth approached hers and mingled his warm breath 
with the breath which escaped cold from her lips. He drew in the 
air with her own rhythm, it was as if his naked heart bowed toward 
hers so that they all at once touched one another. Then the blood 
flamed out of her cheeks and streamed over into his, although they 
lay not upon each other. The blood burned in all her skin and 
Soelver trembled for a moment lest this transport was the begin- 
ning of the awakening. 

"His heart stood still with fear. However the blood continued 
to surge through Gro's body. She pressed Soelver close to herself 
and through her soft clothing he felt her breast swell and throb, as 
if she would bore herself into his flesh. ' Soelver — I love you.' — 
' Gro — I love you.' Then a strange giddiness seized him as if he 
were rushing into her arms on a tower miles high. He breathed 
upon her ethereal kisses, which closed her lips, moistened her fore- 
head and descended thence like a refreshing spring rain so that her 
lids drooped. When her eyes were closed Soelver felt for the first 
time quite secure. He fastened them with a real kiss and now, 
since her sleep wandering had reached its goal in his arms and 
Soelver was sure that her love dream was too deep to be disturbed, 
he whispered louder than before, ' Gro — I love you ! ' — ' Soelver — 
I love you ! ' — ' How long have you loved me ? ' — ' Longer than I 
have known you, Soelver.' — 'Why have you not said so, Gro?' — 
' That, Soelver, I will never tell ! ' 

" So Soelver carried his wonderful burden to his couch and in- 
haled her youthful fragrance and lifted his mouth to hers and all 
his blood at once leaped forth. Every fiber of his being was stirred 
to kisses, every blood drop became a yearning mouth to meet the 
thousand mouths of her blood. And lost to sense — vehemently, 
seized by the divine power of nature, unafraid that she might 
awaken, without control over himself and yet proud as a master of 
worlds, he was impelled as the sunbeam to its goal, when it forces 
open the flower and buries itself in its fragrant depths. Soelver 
united himself with Gro. She on her part slumbered on, quiet as 
the sea which has closed over its sacrifice. 

" But Soelver felt his senses reawakening. What now ? Should 
he let Gro sleep until day woke her and she saw herself in his arms ? 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 55 

He bent over his beloved in deepest distress. She must not awaken 
in terror, not again weep as on that first morning when she was with 
him. The most delicate chords in her soul had trembled and sung 
to him in the night, to him whom she unconsciously loved with all 
the indefinable conviction of her heart. This love must not be rudely 
plucked and allowed to fade like a plant whose tender shoot is torn 
asunder. She must go back to her maiden's couch until the flower 
of the day had burst forth from its leafy covering. Then he discov- 
ered that the panel at the foot of his cot was opened, while some 
planking had been pushed back. Gro must have come this way and 
by this way he carried her back. Led by an unerring instinct, as if 
he knew from his nightly phantasied visits all the turnings of the 
way, he went without deliberation into the secret room behind the 
panel, found the passage to the main stairway, passed straight up, 
turned through corridors, passed under the heavy tapestry curtains, 
opened the last door and noticed first that he bore a burden when 
he laid it down. The moon threw its faint silver light round about 
in the little room. With a sweet wonder Soelver gazed upon the 
prayer stool and the brown rosary — without its cross." 

I may pass briefly over the remainder. In the first place Soelver 
was given his liberty and he went back to his castle. The death of 
Sten Basse occurred soon after. Soelver whispered to his daughter 
at his death bed, " Gro, whatever may happen, know now that we 
belong to one another." She "turned her head slowly toward him 
and looked at him with her large eyes swollen with tears. Her look 
was that of a stranger and quite uncomprehending, so that Soelver 
understood that she did not simply deny everything but she had no 
recollection at all." So Soelver turned and went. For the first 
time when bathing in the lake "he found again his youth and his 
freedom, his radiant hope and the jubilant certainty of his love. 
Gro loved him ! Only the thought of love had not yet arisen from 
the depths of her soul like pearls to the light. Nevertheless the 
wonderful flower of her affection was growing in the golden light 
of dreams. He longed after Gro as after his bride, although he was 
only the bridegroom of her dreams, who dared to kiss her only 
when her eyes were closed. By day he was her foe, as the bear in 
the fairy tale, who by night alone is changed into a beautiful young 
man." 

They met therefore first again at Sten's bier, at the side of which 
they both kneeled. " Gro's eyes were directed upon him as upon a 
stranger, staring with wonder, burning with a mystic light. Why 



56 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

was this stranger here near her, the man whom her dead father had 
tortured and derided ? And yet her eyes were wet with tears of pity 
and she felt that this man only desired to take her hand. Soelver 
observed her with his inmost soul. He pressed the small cross of 
moonshine between his hands, he bent over it and kissed it and a 
gleam from its blazing stones smote Gro's eyes. She stretched out 
her arms and took the cross from him and gazed into the stones as 
into well-known eyes. She knew not how this had come into Soel- 
ver's hands but she also bent over it and kissed it and her soul went 
out toward Soelver as toward a soul far, far away, whom she once 
had known, whom however she could scarcely remember." 

After this Soelver came and went at Egenaes, Sten Basse's 
castle, as if he were lord and heir of the estate. " It was rumored 
also among the tenants and the servants that he was betrothed to 
the maiden Gro. Yet no word of it was exchanged between them. 
Soelver stood by Gro in small things and great, and she allowed 
herself to be guided by his strength and cleverness. Since that night 
when he had kneeled with her at her father's lifeless body, she was 
bound to him by a nameless bond of gratitude, of mutual feeling, 
and by an inner apprehension that their fate was interwoven. Still 
no consciousness of love colored Gro's attitude. She longed for 
Soelver's strong handclasp because it made her will strong to with- 
stand her sorrow. She could think of herself lying upon his broad, 
deep breast, only however because there slumber would come in 
sure forgetfulness. There was moreover a tenderness in her look, 
when in a fleeting moment she let her glance rest upon his, such as 
the realization of another's goodness awakens in us, especially when 
the goodness is undeserved and disinterested. Yet there was never 
any of love's surrender. Only she was glad to know herself ob- 
served by these quiet, steadfast, clear eyes, from which the red 
specter of passion, which had so frightened her that day upon 
Aebeloe, had long been banished. She believed that she had in 
Soelver a friend given her for life and death, a friend who could 
not desire her in love nor be desired, a brother whom one might 
trust with infinitely more serenity than any lover. 

" Soelver was ever watchful of Gro. His eyes were on the look- 
out whether he might not once surprise in hers the brightness of the 
dream, and make the hidden rose of love break through the green 
covering and bloom in reality. He longed thus within himself 
once to see the day and night aspects of her soul melt into a 
wonderful golden twilight. But Gro made no response to the 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 57 

gaze from his eyes. She turned her head aside so that her silken 
lashes concealed her glance. ' Gro, why do you never look at 
me ? ' — ' I do look at you.' — ' Do you see me with your cheek, 
Gro ? ' — ' I see you, though, Soelver. I see you with the outermost 
corner of my eye.' Soelver bent his face beneath hers. 'Are you 
looking at me?' But Gro pressed her lids together as before a 
bright light and shook her head, ' No, Soelver, not so ! You look too 
sharply, you look too deeply. You look so deeply that it hurts me 
very much. No, stand so Soelver, turn your eyes away ! ' — ' Are 
you afraid of me?' — 'No, no — why should I be afraid? But I do 
not feel comfortable to have you all the time wanting to read my 
heart, to have your eyes searching for some writing that does not 
stand written there. My friend and beloved brother, I fear what 
your look would draw from me — what would you drag out from my 
soul ? — ' The spring day, Gro, when we first met/ — ' Ah ! Soelver, 
I scarcely remember it. It seems to me that I have always known 
you, that all your days you have been good and kind to me. Lately 
I have felt it in my heart and upon my cheek, as when my mother 
caressed me and that is long, long ago.' — ' Gro, only say it, you are 
afraid of the word, but not truly — just say it — you love me. — You 
are silent because it is true.' ' No, Soelver, I have never felt that.' — 
' So you have dreamed it, Gro.' — ' Dreamed ! ' Gro became fiery 
red. 'Dreamed — dreamed — oh Soelver, what have I dreamed? 
What do you know of my dreams? To have dreamed is to have 
dreamed, and my dreams belong to me, to me alone ! ' For a moment 
she turned to him a shy, quivering look, then tears trickled down 
from under her drooping lids. But Soelver observed that he had 
hit upon the truth. Immediately however he regretted that he had 
cast this look into the sanctuary of her soul. It was like the curious 
peeping of which the knight had been guilty, spying through the key- 
hole upon his wife, Undine. 

"A long time they sat silent. At last Gro was herself again, 
quiet and controlled. Then she spoke in a soft but firm voice, 
' Soelver, if you remain with me to awaken me to love, then I beg 
of you, go and never return. I can never look upon you with the 
eyes of love. Passion seems to me like a glowing sword, which 
burns out one's eyes as it goes by. There was a day when you 
made the flaming sword of your desire pass by my face — since that 
time it is burned out. I have been blinded, Soelver, I am blind to 
the desire of your eyes, and all your fervent prayers. I have hated 
you, despised you, defied you, yet you have repaid evil with good 



58 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

and now I return good for good. Look not upon me with love's 
eyes, seek not to awaken the dead in me to life. You are to me more 
precious than if the proud brother of my childhood had returned in 
you, your spirit is his, I did not believe that in the will of a man so 
much kindness could dwell. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother, 
or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither 
in words nor in looks for I know no reply/ " 

The young nobleman knew finally, for all his eager power, no 
other way of escape than to go with the king to the war. He saw 
quite clearly that " Gro struggled against the force deep in her heart. 
And yet the day's flaming sun could cause the weak chrysalis of the 
dream to shrivel so that no butterfly would break through the cover- 
ing and rejoice in the strong light of midday. But with Soelver 
away, the longing for him would support the invisible growth of 
the dream and prepare the way for it into consciousness. Ah! it 
was worth his departure." Then he took leave of his beloved. 
" Goodbye ; forget me not on our island. Bid me return when you 
will. The wind will find me, wherever I am. Tell the wild birds, 
when you want me and would call me home." 

Gro, remaining behind alone, first became aware what she had 
lost in him and in his " strong will, which was her source of light." 
She began to long more and more for him who was far away. " Ah, 
if he would only come again ! " And when a bird flew by, she 
" flushed red at her own thought ; was that a message sent forth by 
her desire? This took place contrary to her wish and will — she 
wished not to long for him, not to call him back, not to love him! 
Angrily she roused herself and sought to recall the burning gaze 
with which Soelver had wounded her modesty. So with a vexed 
and hard stroke of the oars she pushed the boat away from Aebeloe." 

When the war was ended, Soelver went to serve the king of 
France. For, as he wrote in a letter sent by carrier pigeon, "he 
who is not summoned, comes not." Meanwhile love towards the 
young nobleman had begun to grow in her bosom. "Night after 
night she dreamed of Soelver and at last one night she suddenly 
awoke and found herself cold and naked, wandering around in her 
room and heard the last note of her heart's unconscious avowal, 
' Soelver, I love you.' There was a change within her. Hour after 
hour would she sit inactive and half asleep, listening to the irregular 
beating of her heart — something was drawing upon her very depths, 
sucking her strength from her, from her proud will, something that 
paralyzed her thought and bound her always to the same name, the 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 59 

same memory." As she listened to her own depths, " she caught a 
momentary something like a weak, quickly beating echo of her own 
slow heart, a busily living little heart, that ticked louder and louder 
until at last it deafened hers. A trembling joy seized her at that 
moment through all her senses as she knew that she bore a life 
within her life, that she enclosed in her body the germ of a new life 
that was not growing from her alone and of her life alone." 

Suddenly a crushing terror overcame her. Who was her child's 
father ? " So abruptly came this question over her naive soul that 
she fancied for a moment that this might be the punishment of fate 
for her longing for Soelver. This longing was desire, and desire 
was sin no less than the love itself. Her wish for him had grown to 
a fire in her blood and now she was stained by her own passion, 
pregnant from her own sin. God's punishment had visited her and 
soon would be visible to all the world. Gro saw however imme- 
diately the foolishness of her thought. For one moment she lingered 
at the thought of the one woman of all the earth, who had immacu- 
lately conceived. Then she uttered an inward prayer that the 
Mother of God would lighten her understanding and give her clear- 
ness of vision that she should not go astray in her brooding over 
this mystery." 

When she questioned her nurse and the latter finally put it to 
her, " Have you spent no night under the same roof with Soelver ? ,a 
then there occurred to her the many nights when she had dreamed! 
of the lonely imprisoned man, who was being punished because of: 
her. When she lay in her bed in the dark, a strange curiosity had 
overcome her to imagine his lot there below and, when sleep seized 
her and dreams chased away the bitter, hard thoughts, her heart 
had become softer and the sun had shone over the visions of her 
dreams as the spring day over the woods blossoming with the green 
May bells. Many a night and many a morning was she awakened 
by a strange burning desire in her thoughts, and her mouth was as 
though touched with fresh dream kisses, and she had entered into 
judgment with her own weak heart and had so inflamed herself 
to scorn and hatred that she had done nothing to soften the fate of 
the prisoner. But how could Soelver have been the guest of her 
dreams ? And how had he been able to command the virgin love fed 
by her slumber ? Then came the nurse to her aid and made it clear 
to her. She knew that the maiden Gro had walked in her sleep; 
the servants had told of a white ghost on the stairs and once she 



60 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

herself had seen it and recognized Gro, who had disappeared upon 
a secret stairway, which led down into the dungeon. She had kept 
still about it, for she thought it was a voluntary sleep walking to 
the young nobleman." 

Thus was Gro enlightened as to the source of her pregnancy. 
" She quivered with shame that the desire in her dreams had the 
power to drive her down to the lonely prisoner and she shook in her 
inmost soul at the memory of that happy dream, which she had had 
the night before her father's death. Now her love suddenly burst 
into the light like a wonderful flower, which suddenly springs up 
with a thousand fragrant buds. Now it was impossible to stem it 
or to conceal it. She had wanted to suppress every germ, with her 
father's coldness and the day's dispassionately proud haughtiness 
she had been willing to stifle every impulse toward love, every long- 
ing for self avowal. Now she found her pride was dead and buried 
and her being within and without was permeated by love. 

" For she had loved Soelver from the first springtime kiss, which 
he had imprinted upon her cheek as she wandered among the fresh 
May bells, loved him in the blow which she had inflicted upon his 
head when he had touched her chaste nakedness, loved him in those 
nights when he had slept uncomplaining in the cellar dungeon, loved 
him in those bitter moments of his humbling when he, in spite of 
scorn and insult, maintained his pride, loved him that evening when 
he kneeled at her father's bier and kissed the hand of his enemy 
now dead, loved him day by day all the time they were together, 
loved him in that hour when she saw his banner disappear among 
the hundred others, and today upon Aebeloe when she heard that 
new life singing within hers. And now she rejoiced; for she bore 
him always within her, she could never again lose her Soelver." 

As we glance over the material of this tale, we find as the nucleus 
of the night wandering and moon walking the strong repression of 
every conscious love impulse and the breaking through of the un- 
conscious in sleep and dream wherever the censor's rule is relaxed. 
For the maiden Gro had loved Soelver from the first moment, yet 
this love was confessed only in moments of occasional self forget- 
fulness, as by the first meeting with the young nobleman, when her 
hand met his, yes, even pressed it for the moment. Only Gro 
should not have been frightened out of her half unconscious action 
by a kiss or a passionate desire, for at once there arose to life within 
her the coldness and haughtiness of her father and the highhanded 
reaction which her mother had manifested to her conqueror. The 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 6 1 

determining factor, to speak in psychoanalytic language, is the 
struggle between the strong sexual rejection and the equally com- 
pelling sexual desire. At first the former held the upper hand with 
our heroine in her waking and conscious action, the latter in the un- 
conscious. Through the force of her will Gro seemed cold, even as 
she had learned of her father. She defended herself from her 
lover's craving by force and blow; even when conquered finally 
through the noble spirit of her enemy, she would see in him only 
the friend for life and death. She directly refused to think of love 
and displaced it to external things, she even bade the young man go 
rather than desire her as his wife. Soelver's devotion reminded her 
most significantly of her mother's tenderness, his pride, of the 
brother of her childhood. " It is as if in you the proud brother of 
my childhood had returned. Your spirit is his. Leave it so, stay 
with me as my brother or leave me like my brother, but never speak 
to me of love, neither in words nor in looks, for I know no reply ! " 

Yet she avoided Soelver's searching eye and as he reminded her 
of her dreams, she was smitten in the depths of her soul. For her 
dreams, she well knew, chased away the bitter and hard thoughts, 
the repressed unconscious broke through and the true feeling of her 
loving heart. This already appeared clear to her when her beloved 
languished in captivity at her father's hands. The strange desire 
to work out the fate of the young nobleman, who suffered on her 
account, had overcome her lying there in her bed in the dark. And 
in the morning she awoke with a strange burning desire in her 
thoughts and her mouth was flecked with his fresh dream kissees. 
Still she consciously kept back every outer manifestation of love 
and met the young man while her father was alive with coldness 
and suspicion and later even merely as a brother. The great dis- 
tance separating her beloved from her and above all the child which 
she bore from him under her heart for the first time conquer her 
haughty pride and her conscious aversion. And as she dreams one 
night again of the loved one far away she finds herself suddenly 
awake, going about cold and naked in her room and perceives as 
the lingering sound of her heart's unconscious avowal, " Soelver, I 
love you ! " 

So severe is this struggle between conscious sexual denial and 
unconscious desire, that it even forces itself through in her sleep 
and her night wandering. Her dreams had indeed, as she later 
acknowledged with shame, the force and the power to compel her 
below into the young nobleman's dungeon. She had clasped Soel- 



62 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

ver's hand in her sleep, she had told him everything in the moon- 
light, with eyes closed, everything which she secretly felt, and had 
pressed him to herself. Yet when he asked her why she could 
never confess to him that she had always loved him so deeply, she 
repulsed him : " That I will never tell ! " Even when he had united 
himself to his beloved, she had slumbered on as if nothing had 
happened and the next day knew nothing of it all. 

This leads now to that which, according to folk belief, consti- 
tutes the very core, the chief ground for sleep walking and moon 
walking in a maiden. It is easy to understand the wish, on the part 
of the female sex with their strongly demanded sexual repression, 
to come to the beloved one and taste all the delights of satisfaction 
but without guilt. This is possible only through wandering in un- 
conscious sleep. For, as my first patient explained, one is not ac- 
countable for anything that happens in this state, and thus can enjoy 
without sin and without consciousness of what is not permitted. 
Convention demands that the maiden wait until the lover approaches 
her, but in that unconscious state she may surrender herself. The 
need for repression explains then the subsequent amnesia. Yet 
wandering by night is not concerned merely with sexual enjoyment, 
over and above that it fulfills a second desire that arises out of child- 
hood, as we know from psychoanalysis. Every small maiden has, 
that is, the wish to have a child by her father, her first love, which 
is often in later years defined thus, one might have a child, but with- 
out a husband. The night wandering fulfills this desire to have a 
child yet without sin. Therefore has that motive of an uncon- 
scious, not to say immaculate, conception inspired not a few poets, 
as it has already, as is well known, been active in the creation of the 
drama. 

Less transparent than that chief motive is the action of the light, 
sunlight as well as moonlight. The heroine of the story stands 
toward both in a special relationship. Her body is almost illumi- 
nated by its own light, her hair sparkles electrically when it is 
touched, "warm waves of light" emanate from her, which Soelver 
noticed at their first meeting, the sun seems expressly to seek her, a 
halo of impalpable beauty surrounds her and above all glows from 
the depths of her eyes. Not only so, Gro seems to dwell chiefly in 
the light, whose last drops she greedily absorbs within herself. 
When the light fades, her body becomes cold as ice like a corpse. 
In similar manner the shining of the full moon affects her, the light 
of which the stones of her gold cross have absorbed. The first time 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 63 

that the slumbering youth saw Gro wandering, it seemed to him as 
if the moonlight had been loosed from the planet and floated only 
in his room like a living being. The poet, to be sure, has offered no 
explanation of this mystical effect of light and what the reader may 
think for himself would be merely drawn from other sources. For 
this reason I will not pursue this point further. 

The narrative affords somewhat further means for an under- 
standing in another direction. It is not explained more fully just 
why Gro follows the sunlight and moonlight or why both exercise 
upon her a peculiar attraction, yet the tendency to a motor break- 
ing through of the unconscious may be derived from an inherited 
disposition. The father is a rough, violent robber knight while the 
mother shows distinctly sadistic traits and a truly ready hand at 
fighting. That confirms what I explained in the first part, a height- 
ened muscular excitability and muscle eroticism, which strives to 
break through again on the sexual side in sleep walking. Finally it 
may be affirmed without doubt that the ghostly white figure upon 
the stairs was no other than the maiden in her shift. 

" Jorn Uhl," by Gustav Frenssen. 

I can deal more briefly with Jorn Uhl," the well-known rural 
romance of Frenssen, in which the sketch of a moon walker con- 
stitutes merely an episode. Joern Uhl, who, returned from the 
war, takes over the farm of his unfortunate father, discovers Lena 
Tarn as the head maid-servant. She pleased him at first sight. 
" She was large and strong and stately in her walk. Besides her 
face was fresh with color, white and red, her hair golden and 
slightly wavy. He thought he had never seen so fresh and at the 
same time so goodly appearing a girl. He was pleased also at the 
way she nodded to him and said 'good evening ' and looked him 
over from head to foot with such open curiosity and sincere friend- 
liness." She sings too much to please the old housekeeper ! " She 
is so pert and too straightforward with her speech." It is note- 
worthy too that she talks to herself in unquiet sleep. 

Lena Tarn can soon make observations also upon her side. 
Joern was very short with the old graybeard, who advised him to an 
early marriage: "The housekeeper is with me, I do not need a 
wife." Lena, entering just then, heard what the unmannerly coun- 
tryman said and assumed a proud look, thinking to herself, " What 
is the sly old man saying ! " Since however the old man began to 
talk and compelled her and Joern Uhl to listen, she was concerned 



64 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

almost entirely for the latter, whose " long, quiet face with its deep 
discerning eyes she observed with a silent wonder, without shyness, 
but with confident curiosity." Not alone in the kitchen, which is 
under her control, can Lena show what is in her. When a young 
bull broke loose and came after the women, she met him with 
sparkling eyes, " Stop you wretch ! " When he would not allow 
himself to be turned aside, she threw a swift look flashing with 
anger upon the men, who were idly looking on, then swung the 
three-legged milking stool which she had taken along and hit the 
bull so forcibly on the head with it that frightened, he lunged off 
sideways. " Lena Tarn had however all afternoon a red glow 
coming and going in her cheeks because the farmer had looked upon 
her with the eyes of a high and mighty young man. That caused her 
secretly both joy and concern." Immediately after this she ex- 
perienced one satisfaction. Joern Uhl was dragged into the water 
by a mischievous calf and was much worse cut up by it than she, 
the weaker one, the woman had been. 

" Lena saw always before her the face which Joern Uhl had 
made when she had gone forward against the bull. She was 
otherwise in the best of humors, but when, as in the last few days, 
she was not quite well physically she was inclined to be angry. She 
preserved a gloomy countenance as well and as long as she could. 
Soon though, as she went here and there about her work and felt 
the new fresh health streaming through her limbs, she altered her 
looks. . . . Joern Uhl moreover could not be quiet that day. The 
sudden plunge in the water had brought his blood to boiling. The 
spring sunshine did its part. A holiday spirit came over him and he 
thought that he would go into the village and pay his taxes, which 
were due. On the way he thought of Lena Tarn. Her hair is 
coiled upon her head like a helmet of burnished brass, which slips 
into her neck. When she 'does things,' as she says, her eyes are 
stern and directed eagerly upon her work. When on the other hand 
she is spoken to and speaks with any one she is quick to laugh. 
Work seems to her the only field where quiet earnestness is in place. 
1 That must be so,' she says. Toward everything else she is angry 
or in a good humor, mostly the latter. Only toward me is she short 
and often spiteful. It has been a great joke for her that I had the 
ill luck to have to go into the water with that stupid beast. If she 
only dared she would spread it three times a day on my bread and 
butter and say ' There you have it.' " 

Now he meets old Dreier who gives him good advice : " How 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 65 

old are you? Twenty-four? Don't you marry, Joern. On no ac- 
count. That would be the stupidest thing that you could do. I 
bet you $50,000 you don't dare do it. Time will tell, I say." " Take 
it for granted that I will wait yet ten years," he answered. And he 
went on thinking to himself, " It is pleasanter to go thus alone and 
let one's thoughts run on. Marry? Marry now? I will be on my 
guard. After I am thirty ! " Then his thought came back to Lena. 
" She looked well as she flung the stool at the bull. Prancing like a 
three-year-old horse. Yesterday she did not look so well, her eyes 
were not so bright, she spoke harshly to Wieten (the old house- 
keeper) and said to her afterwards, ' Do not mind it, Wieten, I 
slept badly,' and laughed. Funny thing, slept badly ? When one is 
on the go as she must be all day, one should sleep like a log. But 
that is all right in the May days. It is well that men understand 
this, otherwise every spring the world would go all to pieces." Then 
he rejoiced that he was so young and could point out on the farm 
what was his. " Later, when the years have gone by and I am well 
established I will take to myself a fine wife with money and golden 
hair. There are also rich girls who are as merry and fresh and as 
desirable and have as stately forms. It need not be just this one." 

Then he came to the parish clerk who had just been notified that 
day of six children to be baptized and who was complaining of the 
increase in births. Joern agreed with him : " What will we come to, 
if the folk increase like that? Marrying before twenty-five must 
simply be forbidden." " With these words he departed, filled with 
a proud consciousness that he was of the same opinion with so in- 
telligent, experienced an old man as the parish clerk." At home he 
met Lena Tarn with an old farmer, who came to inquire after the 
fate of his son who had been with Joern in the war. Then for the 
first time the girl heard of the frightful misery and the suffering of 
the soldiers which cried to heaven, so that her face was drawn 
with pain. " Deep in her soul however thrilled and laughed a secret 
joy, that you have come back whole, Joern Uhl." 

Later, when she was making out the butter account with the 
farmer, "she had to bend her glowing head over the book, which 
he held in his hand. There came such a glistening in his eyes that 
he wrinkled his forehead and did not conceal his displeasure at such 
an unsteady flashing." In the evening she came to get back the 
book. Then Joern spoke to her, "You have not been in a good 
humor these last days. Is anything the matter?" She threw her 
head back and said shortly, " Something is the matter sometimes 



66 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

with one; but it soon passes over." — "As I came through the pas- 
sage yesterday evening I heard you call out in your sleep in your 
room." " Oh, well ! . . . I have not been well." — " What . . . you 
not well? The moon has done that. It has been shining into your 
room." — " I say, though, there may be some other cause for that." 
— "I say that comes from the moon." She looked at him angrily, 
"As if you knew everything ! I did not call out in my sleep at all 
but was wide awake. Three calves had broken out and were frisking 
around in the grass. I saw them clearly in the moonlight. I called 
them." He laughed mockingly, " Those certainly were moon calves." 
"So? I believe not. For I brought them in myself this morning 
and then I saw that the stable door stood open. I thought to myself, 
the boy has gone courting tonight. Your eyes always sweep over 
everything and light upon everything and you [du] worry so over 
everything out of order, I wonder that you [du] have not seen it." 
— "You say 'thou' [du] to me?" — "Yes, you say it to me. I 
am almost as great as you and you are not a count, and I am as in- 
telligent as you." She carried her head pretty high and as she 
snatched the book from the window seat as if it lay there in the fire, 
he saw the splendid scorn in her eyes. " Take care of yourself 
when the moon is shining," he said, " otherwise again tonight you 
will have to guard the calves." 

" He had arisen, but dared not touch her. They looked at one 
another however and each knew how it stood with the other. He 
had again the look which he had revealed once in the morning, a 
presuming look, confident of victory, such a look as if he would 
say, ' I know well enough how such a maidenly scorn is to be inter- 
preted/ But her eyes said, 'I am too proud to love you.' She 
went slowly into the darkness of her room as if she would give him 
time yet to say something or to long after her. He was however 
too slow for that and laughed in confusion." 

The night fell upon them, a wonderful still night. " I will take 
one more look at the moon," thought Joern Uhl and took his tele- 
scope. He went through the middle door with as little noise as pos- 
sible, but the door of Lena's room stood open and she appeared upon 
the threshold and leaned against the side post. "Are you still 
awake ? " he asked anxiously. " It is not yet late " — " The sky is so 
clear. I want to look at the stars once more. If you wish you may 
come with me." At first she remained standing, then he heard her 
coming after him. When he had directed his telescope to a nebulous 
star he invited her to look in. She placed herself so awkwardly that 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 67 

he laid his hand on her shoulder and asked her, "What do you 
see ? " — " Oh ! " she said, " I see — I see — a large farmhouse, which 
is burning. It has a thatched roof. Oh ! — Everything is burning ; 
the roof is all in flames. Sparks are flying about. It is really an 
old Ditmarsh farmhouse." — " No, my girl, you have too much im- 
agination, which is bad for science. — What else do you see?" — 
" I see — I see — at one side of the farmhouse a plank which is dark ; 
for the burning house is behind it. But I can look deep into the 
burning hall. Three, four sheaves have fallen from the loft and lie 
burning on the blazing floor. Oh, how frightful that is ! Show me 
another house which is not burning. — Show me a house, you know, 
show me a farmyard just where they are who hunt up the calves." 
He laughed merrily. "You huzzy," said he, "you might well see 
your three-legged stool in the sky, not ? So, high overhead ! " — 
" You should have had the three-legged stool. I do not forget you 
that day, you . . . and how you looked at me. That you may 
believe." 

He had never yet let anyone share in his observations. Now he 
marveled and was pleased at her astonishment and joy. And then 
he showed her the moon. He placed her and held her again by the 
arm as if she were an awkward child. She was astonished at the 
masses on it : " What are those ? Boiling things, like in our copper 
kettles ? Exactly. What if it hung brightly scoured over our fire- 
place and tomorrow morning the fire shone up upon it." — "The 
boiling things are mountains and valleys. — And now you have seen 
enough and spoken wisely enough. Go inside. You will be cold 
and then you will dream again and see in the dream I do not know 
what. Will you be able to sleep ? " — " I will try." He wanted again 
to reach out his hand to her but his high respect for her held him 
back. He thought he should not grasp her thus, along the way as it 
were. " Make haste," he said, " to get away." 

She went and he remained to pursue his studies. So the time 
passed. He had grown eager and busied himself noiselessly with 
his telescope. "And he thrust aside once more that young life, 
which an hour ago had breathed so very near him and came again 
to the old beaten track of thought that the old Dreier was right. 
1 Don't do anything foolish, Joern.' — And yet, * Fine she is and 
good. Happy the man about whose neck her arms lie. — What pre- 
cious treasure must those eyes hold, when they can look with such 
frank confidence at a man.' " 



68 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

About him now were only the customary sounds of night. Sud- 
denly it was as if near by over the house roof and then at the side at 
the wall of the house he heard the soft cry of a goose and the weak 
flapping of wings. And " as he looked, there stood under the house 
roof in the bright moonlight a white human form, with one hand 
over the eyes and with the other feeling along the wall, as if it would 
enter the house where there was however no door. It spoke in ex- 
cited hurried words, 'The calves are in the garden; you must be 
more on the watch. Get up Joern and help me/ Joern Uhl came 
in three long strides over the turf and softly called her name: 'I 
am here. — Here I stand. — It is I. — So ! so ! — Now be still. — It is I. 
— No one else is here.' She was speechless and began to rub her 
eyes with the back of her hand, as a child rubs the sleep out of its 
eyes, and she fretted also in childish fashion. Then he -embraced 
her and told her again where she was, and led her to the stable door 
seeking to comfort her. ' Look, here is the door of the stable. Here 
you have gone through, you dreamer ; you have gone all through the 
stable in your sleep. Have you been seeking the moon calves ? Ah 
you foolish child! — So, here you need not be anxious. You will 
straightway be back in your room.' When she finally clearly recog- 
nized her situation, she was frightened, flung her hands against her 
face and uttered mournful cries. ' Oh, oh, how frightful this is ! ' 
But he caressed her, took her hands from her face and said to her 
feelingly, ' Now stop that complaining. Let it be as it is.' So they 
came to the open door, which led to her room. It must have been a 
remarkable night, for not only had half the calves in the pasture 
broken out and in the morning were actually standing in the garden 
and the court, but the boy this night of all nights had not come 
home, but only returned in the early morning twilight." 

The next morning Joern Uhl went to the parish clerk that the 
banns might be published for him and the nineteen year old Lena 
Tarn. He was almost embarrassed when he came again before her, 
" I should merely like to know what you think of me." As she re- 
mained speechless, he came nearer. " You have always been a great 
heroine, especially to me. Hold your head high and make it known 
that I am right." She was still silent, merely pressed both hands 
to her temples and stared into the glowing hearth. Then he drew 
one of her hands down softly from her hair, seized it and went 
with her over the vestibule, through the door communicating with 
the front of the house. She followed him passively, her eyes upon 
the ground and the other hand still on her hair. In the living room 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 69 

he led her to the large chair which stood by the window and forced 
her into it. " So," said he softly, " here we are all alone, Lena. 
Here in this chair has Mother sat many a Sunday afternoon. You 
now belong in it." Still she said nothing. "I have been to the 
parish clerk and arranged everything and the wedding will be in 
June. Have you nothing to say yet?" Then she seized his hands 
and said softly, "As you think, it is all good so " And she covered 
her face with her hands and wept. Then he began to stroke her 
and kiss her. " Child, only cease your weeping. You are my fair 
little bride. Only be happy again." And in his distress he said, 
"I will never do it again. Only laugh again." At last when he 
could think of no more cajoling names, he called her "Redhead." 
Then she had to laugh, for that was the name of the best cow, which 
stood first in the stalls. Now she lifted her head and gazed long at 
him without moving. Thus Joern Uhl came rightly to that tender- 
ness and comfort which he thought he deserved. 

I have only a little to add that is important for our theme. As a 
young wife also Lena Tarn was busy the whole day, working from 
early to late without rest. The work flew from her hand. And 
when her confinement was over, she got up the sixth day, against 
the earnest warning of the housekeeper, cared for her boy alone the 
whole day, went even to the kitchen and carried water for his bath. 
Joern Uhl allowed it. For he was proud to have such a strong wife, 
" not so affected as the others." It led however to her death. Some- 
how she must have become infected, for soon after a severe childbed 
fever broke out. 

Even as a young wife she, the poor humble cottager's daughter 
whose childhood was pinched by bitterest need, shed a wealth of 
love and joy upon all who dwelt about her. Yet now, "she, the 
friendly one, who had never caused suffering to any one, went in 
her fever delirium to every one in the house, even the smallest 
servant boy and to every neighbor and begged their forgiveness, ' if 
I have done anything to hurt you in any way/ Towards morning 
she became quieter but it was the exhaustion of death and she spoke 
with great difficulty. Her husband must 'tell Father that she had 
loved him.' Joern Uhl sobbed violently: 'Who has never spoken 
a kind word to you, poor child.' She tried to smile. ' You have had 
nothing but toil and work,' he said. Then she made him under- 
stand in labored speech that she had been very happy." The last 
fever phantasies finally put her back into her childhood. Her love 
went out to the old teacher Karstensen, then again to Joern Uhl, 



70 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

until she was finally led through angels to a further father-incar- 
nation, to the dear God. " It came to her like peace and strength. 
Clasped by many hands and led forward, she came to an earnest, 
holy form who leaned forward and looked kindly upon her. Then 
she stretched her hand out and suddenly she had a great bunch of 
glowing red flowers in her hand. She gave them to him saying, 
* That is all that I have. I pray you let me remain with you. I am 
fearfully weary. Afterwards I will work as hard as I can. If you 
would like to hear it, I will gladly sing at my work.' " 

Scarcely in any other tale is the fierce strife between the clearly 
active sexual longing, and the conscious sexual denial present at the 
same time, as well as the final victory which the unconscious at- 
tains, so plainly shown as in Gustav Frenssen's romance, where the 
moon walking, exhibitionistic woman completely overthrows the 
reasoning of the man. The poet expresses it clearly and decisively : 
They each knew the desire of the other. Joern Uhl saw through 
the meaning of a maiden's scorn and Lena's eyes said, I am too 
proud to love you, but I do love you. Yet opportunity must be 
given to the unconscious to break through victoriously so that the 
inhibiting reason shall be deprived of its power. Therefore the 
powerful increase of libido with the woman during the occurrence 
of menstruation and through the wooing of the boy, who lets the 
calves break out, in the man through the cold bath and further- 
more in both through the seductive May air. Finally the moon 
acts directly with its light as a precipitating cause. 

The night before she had spoken out loud in her sleep just as 
Joern Uhl went by to his room. He had spoken of it directly as 
the action of the moonlight, which she of course contradicted; she 
had been lying awake and heard the calves break out. 19 Then she 
takes the following night, when the housekeeper, with whom she 
slept, was sitting up nursing an old farmer and the boy had gone 
courting again, to approach Joern Uhl on her part as a moon walker, 
who knew nothing of what she did and could not be held respon- 
sible. More than this her unconscious had a fitting speech ready, 
the calves had broken out again. 

The breaking through of the motor impulse is also well grounded. 
Everything with Lena Tarn is joy in muscular activity, the restless, 

19 Has not the bringing in of these animals and of the word mooncalves 
a hidden closeness of meaning? The repetition twice of the same motive, the 
analogy with the case at the beginning which I analyzed, and at last the fact 
that Lena, when she looked at the stars, wanted to see a farmhouse where 
some one was just driving out the calves, all this gives food for thought. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 7 1 

almost unappeasable desire for work and pleasurable "getting 
things done," " exerting herself," the constant singing, the easy giv- 
ing way to anger. Work is the only thing which she can carry on 
earnestly because in that she lives out in part her sexuality, she 
meets every one else smilingly or angrily according to her mood. 
It is noteworthy too that her unquiet libido transforms itself toward 
Joern Uhl into anger and animosity and so much so that once in 
anger she addresses him as "thou" and acts as if she were his 
beloved. 

One thing is especially evident in this example of sleep walking 
and moon walking, the invariably infantile bearing of these phenom- 
ena. When Lena, walking in her sleep, was called by her lover, she 
rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand as a child rubs the sleep 
from its eyelids and fretted also in childish fashion. Then again 
there is her strange behavior when Joern announces that he has ar- 
ranged for the publishing of the banns. The farmer had in a sig- 
nificant way put her literally into the mother's place and then in the 
same manner shown tenderness toward her, stroking and caressing 
her, as he himself had once been treated by his mother. Still Lena, 
who already in the night responded to the sudden realization of her 
position with the cry, " Oh, oh, how frightful this is ! " cannot yet 
quiet herself. It is hardly to be believed that a farm maiden would 
so lose control of herself at the thought of an illegitimate relation- 
ship, which furthermore was to be immediately legalized by mar- 
riage. Many things however point to this — I mention only her 
later fever phantasies — that she always felt inwardly guilty because 
she had been untrue to some one else, the first beloved of her child- 
hood, her own father. Only when Joern Uhl on his part becomes 
a child and in his way solemnly declares " I will never do it again," 
and in the end names her " Redhead," apparently a pet name of her 
parent, then she has to laugh and looks long at him without moving, 
wondering perhaps if he is the real father. After this everything 
falls into proper place. I can now somewhat extend the statement 
at the beginning of this section. Night wandering and moon walk- 
ing have not only inner connections with the infantile but more 
exactly with the infantile erotic. 

I will briefly mention still one circumstance in conclusion. The 
influence of the moonlight is but little touched upon in our tale. 
Joern Uhl speaks of it only once. There is on the contrary a con- 
nection with actual occurrences, a recent cause for Lena's moon 
walking. She has looked at the moon through the lover's telescope 

6 



72 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

and received instruction in regard to it. That wakens the memory 
of the instruction of the old Karstensen, her teacher when she at- 
tended the folk school, from which we understand that he appears 
in the place of her father. 

" Maria," by Otto Ludwig. 

Perhaps no poet has felt so deeply and expressed so clearly 
what constitutes the fundamental problem of sleep walking and 
moon walking as Otto Ludwig in his youthful novel " Maria." This 
novel has, according to a letter from the poet, "sprung from the 
anecdote of the rich young linen draper, who was passionately 
roused to commit an unnatural offence at sight of the landlord's 
daughter laid out apparently dead in the room through which he 
was conducted to his own. As a result of this, when he put up 
there years after, he found her, whom he supposed to have been 
buried, a mother, who had no knowledge as to who was her child's 
father." 

This anecdote, which he learned from a friend, took such a hold 
upon him that he immediately wrote down not only what he had 
heard but the first plan, although upon the insistent protestation of 
that friend he did not work out the story as it had been first con- 
ceived nor so glaringly. "I saw," writes our poet, "at first only 
the psychological interest in this material. The problem was to 
present the story as well as possible and this was indeed a significant 
one for the narrator. A distinctly esthetic interest would not be 
possible in conjunction with that." 

There is no doubt in the mind of the experienced psychoanalyst 
that, when a poet is laid hold of in this manner by an anecdote, this 
only happens because his own significant infantile complexes are 
roused out of the unconscious. Also the transformations, not 
unworthy of consideration, which the poet makes with the story are 
highly indicative. The seemingly dead maiden becomes a moon 
walker, the landlord's daughter is changed to the attractive daughter 
of a pastor. " Out of the linen draper there is finally made a culti- 
vated, artistically sensitive youth, who has in him much of Lud- 
wig's own personality" (Borcherdt). The finished romance the 
poet considered the best which he had so far created, it came nearest 
to his ideal of a story. Although his attempts always failed to find a 
publisher for the " Maria," the poet retained his love for this work 
all his life and it was one of the few productions of his youth which 
he occasionally still shared with his friends in his last years. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 73 

The theme of " Maria " is, as indeed the significant title repre- 
sents, the unconscious, not to say, the immaculate conception. It is 
unconscious because the heroine, drawn by the moon and walking 
in her sleep, comes to her beloved and becomes pregnant by him 
without a conscious memory of the experience. Furthermore the 
analogy with the Mother of God becomes emphasized by the fact 
that in a picture " Mary and Magdalene " described at the begin- 
ning, the Queen of Heaven bears quite unmistakably the features 
of the heroine of the title. The main event, with its results and dis- 
covery, is developed out of the character of both hero and heroine 
with extraordinary psychical keenness. 

Eisener like Maria is the only child of rich parents. For both 
love manifests itself for the most part rather unfortunately. Ap- 
parently neither gets on well with the father and both have early 
lost their mothers. Only Eisener even yet clings with deepest ven- 
eration to the mother who taught him to revere all women and, 
judging from his words, her influence upon her husband and the 
son's desire still appears. "Whatever of good there is in me, I owe 
to women. The thought of my excellent mother restrained me from 
many an indiscretion, as also the teaching and the example of the 
wisest and best of men (the father). This gentle power which is 
so sweet to obey and at the same time so full of reward ! In loving 
surrender it obeys the man, while its divine power rules the man 
without his knowing it. The imperceptible but mighty influence of 
her gentle presence has determined his decision before he has com- 
prehended it. It has fallen upon him in his anger like an angel 
before his own strength could arm itself, it has turned him to what 
is right and proper before he is conscious of the choice. Before 
her clear look confusion cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence 
sinks back unspoken into the shame filled breast. The brightness 
of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon the fallen bringing 
pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles upon the 
penitent. These are the suns about which the planets of greatness, 
honor and beauty revolve, lighted and warmed by them." Maria's 
mother on the other hand is not praised by a single syllable. We 
do not discover when she died nor how old the little one was when 
she lost her natural protectress. Only indirectly can one make 
conjectures in regard to this peculiarly important point. 

Maria was from an early age a marvelous child. " She spoke 
a language of her own, which only the initiated or a very poetic per- 
son could understand. All lifeless things lived for her; she trans- 



74 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

ferred to flowers, trees, buildings, yes, even furniture and clothing 
the feelings of a human soul. She mixed sense impressions in her 
speech in the strangest fashion, so that she asserted of tones that 
they looked red or blue, and inversely of the colors that they sounded 
cheerful or sad. A girl a few years older than she named her the 
blue song." Both phenomena, the attributing of life to inanimate 
things, to which one speaks as to beloved human beings, as well as 
the phenomenon of synesthesia, color audition and seeing of tone 
colors, are as we know positively today, to be referred back to 
erotic motives. 20 

"With Maria's seventh year perhaps, the tendency to play and 
purposeless dreaming, which is always bound with such lively, 
mobile phantasy, gave place, to the astonishment of all, to an ex- 
actly opposite tendency. From this time she began to take root in 
life with all the intensity of her nature. Already in her twelfth or 
thirteenth year she looked after the father's household, to the ad- 
miration of all who beheld her. A divine blessing seemed to accom- 
pany everything which she undertook; everything increased under 
her hands. She could in passing enjoy herself well in the idealistic 
dreams of the poets and of her acquaintances, but her own peculiar 
element was reality." 

What had produced this sudden turn about? I cannot escape 
the conjecture that here the death of her mother had a decisive in- 
fluence and with it the necessity to take the place with her father 
of his wife. Her housewifely activity is noted first to be sure from 
her twelfth or thirteenth year. Yet I am of the opinion that she 

20 According to my psychoanalytic experience children who cling so to 
inanimate things see in them either sexual symbols or those things were once 
objects of their secret sexual enjoyment. It may happen, for example, that 
such a child falls in love with the furniture, the walls of the room, yes, even 
a closet, stays there by the hour, kisses the walls, tells them its joys and sor- 
rows and hangs them with all sorts of pictures. One very often sees children 
talking with inanimate things. They are embarrassed and break off at once 
if surprised by their elders. If there were not something forbidden behind 
this, there would be no ground for denying what they are doing, the more 
so since in fairy tales beasts, plants and also inanimate things speak with man- 
kind and with one another without the child taking offense at it. The latter 
first becomes confused by the same action when he is pilfering from the tree 
of knowledge and has something sexual to hide. Hug-Hellmuth has con- 
vincingly demonstrated the erotic connection of the child's enthusiasm for 
plants as well as the different synesthesias. (See her study, " tiber Farben- 
horen," Imago, Vol. I, pp. 218 ff. Abstracted in Psa. Rev., Vol. II, Xo. 1, 
January, 1915.) 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 75 

had already in her seventh year begun to play this role — in which 
year the death of her mother would be placed — only because she 
was too small it had been under the eye of a maid or housekeeper. 
My analyses of hysterics has taught me that so profound and sud- 
den a transformation of the whole character always takes place 
upon definite erotic grounds and for a quite definite erotic purpose. 

The earliest love of the tiny maiden belongs almost always to 
her own father, who is in truth her first beloved. One can often 
hear it from the child's lips, "You know, Papa, when Mama dies 
then I will marry you." That is in the childish sense meant quite 
properly and literally. The early, premature death of the mother 
gives reality to such infantile wishes, at least as far as concerns the 
care of the house. As soon then as Maria may begin to play this 
part, she fills it in a striking and inimitable fashion, although in 
years she is yet a mere child. She is altogether the mother in the 
care of a boy outside the family and this, as he quite rightly re- 
marked, laughing boisterously and heartily, even where it is not 
necessary. Thus her first thought, when she spends her first night 
banished from home, is of "the poor father, who must go to bed 
without the little services to which he is so accustomed." 

She possesses a maturity in the management of the household 
which few elders have. Everything goes on and is done without 
any one noticing that it is being done. " Is there anything more 
charming than this sixteen year old little house mother in her house- 
keeping activities?" says one of her admirers. "Just look, let her 
do what she will, she accomplishes it in the best way and at the same 
time most beautifully." She is quite contented in the position 
which she has made. Her eroticism seems completely satisfied. 
" She is psychically yet so little a woman that there is not the least 
sexual inclination in the charm that infuses her and therefore her 
bodily development is overlooked. There is also no trace yet of 
that entrancing shyness which springs from the mere suspicion that 
there must be something else about the man." A friend of the fam- 
ily expresses it thus : " When one considers the repose, the self 
possession of her nature, the freedom from constraint and the spir- 
ituality of it, one might almost believe that she was not originally 
of this earth but perhaps a native of the moon, which seems to ex- 
ercise more influence upon her than the earth" Every* trace of 
dreamy maiden phantasies, which represent nothing but unconscious 
love desires, was wanting in her. What she formerly possessed of 
these was now completely bound with her care of the father. 



76 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

Her erotic nature is for the time satisfied and needs nothing more 
to veil it and has nothing to wish for. Therefore she has on the one 
hand kept childhood's clearness of vision, before which there can 
be no deceit, on the other hand unbroken contentment with herself 
and all the world as well as the capacity to forgive immediately 
every wrong suffered. According to the picture drawn by the poet 
of the passionate nature of the father, which is capable of hurrying 
him, the pastor, into reviling God, it seems to me plain why Maria, 
if she suffered wrong, " is distressed merely over the remorse which 
the other one, she knows, must feel, when he has finally come to an 
insight and to reflection." This is nothing else than the father's 
voice, who had once done wrong to his child and had in a later 
searching of heart repented of it. Maria, with such early satisfac- 
tion of her feelings of love begged "even as a child for nothing 
which the parents had to refuse her. If she had any need it was to 
be busy, to take care of the order and the nourishment of the house, 
the satisfaction and welfare of the inmates. Where she could love, 
she was happy and at home. Yet even the love for her father never 
proclaimed itself passionately but always rather in unwearied atten- 
tion and concern for his smallest need, which only she might sus- 
pect as well as for that which manifested itself actively." For her- 
self she scarcely had any wants. A piece of bread and two apples 
satisfied her as her day's nourishment, which is typical for the hys- 
teric anorexia and perhaps merely signifies the unconscious wish to 
cost the father as little as possible. Just one single characteristic 
was wanting for her perfection, the soft, clinging, typically feminine 
characteristic. This also becomes understandable when one con- 
siders that all eroticism toward the father is inhibited in its sexual 
goal, and may manifest itself only intellectually on account of the 
incest barrier, at least as far as it comes into consciousness. 

The womanly within her shall nevertheless find release through 
the young Eisener. I have mentioned above how he hung upon his 
mother. As the early inclination of the small maiden is generally 
toward the father, so the first love of the boy is for the mother. It 
is she who teaches him to love and to seek the woman of his heart 
according to her own image. Later, just before puberty we might 
say, the boy becomes acquainted with the secrets of sexual life, then, 
clinging to certain impulses of his childhood, he begins to desire the 
mother also in the newly acquired sense, while he begins to hate 
the father as a favored rival, who stands in the way of this wish, 
and develops a conscious antagonism toward him. He falls, as we 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 77 

say, under the domination of the CEdipus complex. Yet the wishes 
toward the mother go as a rule no further, since meanwhile the 
incest barrier has already for a long time been erected. Through 
this the boy is compelled to submit the mother complex to a split- 
ting. For a moment the phantasy may come to him that the mother 
shall conduct him into the sexual life — a feature not wanting in 
any youth — but it is now decidedly rejected or more typically dis- 
placed upon those women who make of love a profession and actu- 
ally take care to initiate the youth into the sexual life. For this 
reason the remainder of the mother complex is idealized and the 
mother transformed to a pure virgin woman, toward whom no man 
dares direct his desire. Similarly is it with the loved one, whom one 
chooses after the pattern of the mother. 

So Eisener expresses himself warmly. " Maria is not made for 
love, only for reverence.' " 

Yet without the child's craving for the mother 21 he would not 
have become a compulsive neurotic, 22 with all the hypermorality of 
the latter, pride in his moral purity and extravagant self reproaches, 
even a lustful self laceration after he had at one single time been 
overpowered by sensuality. Furthermore his lack of resoluteness, 
decisiveness and courage is not, as he mentions, the result of his 
myopia but of his neurosis. He has developed himself, out of an 
unconscious rivalry, in direct contrast to his intensely narrow- 
minded father. The latter was only a tradesman, who set his com- 
fort above everything, for whom art had value only in so far as it 
increased his own enjoyment of life. So painting becomes the son's 
chief delight in spite of his exaggerated myopia or perhaps just on 
account of it. He bore his father's tyranny with difficulty 23 and 
with inner protest. His tendency toward the free kingdom of art 
stood in contrast to him, and in the same way he sought on the 
other hand a substitute for the mother in every woman. He offered 
up for his sin the dreams of his youth when he first believed that 
his moral nature was stained and became as a result, as even the 
elder feels uneasily, an over obedient son. 

21 One thinks of Eisener's panegyric: "Before her clear look confusion 
cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence sinks back unspoken into the shame 
filled breast. The brightness of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon 
the fallen bringing pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles 
upon the penitent." 

22 Like Otto Ludwig himself. 

23 The well-known psychic overcompensation in congenital organic infe- 
riority. 



78 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

How had this so easily befallen him with a mother so deeply 
honored! Around her spun all the boy's love desire and twined 
itself about her, and all that lava heated feeling belonging so pecul- 
iarly to the child alone. He had hung upon that idol the longing of 
his heart, the phantasies of a power of imagination lustfully ex- 
cited, which is not indeed wanting in the best of children, although 
commonly these are inhibited, and later even completely forgotten 
because of restraining moral impulses. Therefore the memory of 
the highly honored mother is awakened not only through Maria, the 
pure one, but also through Julie, who comes into contact with his 
sensual desire and the unclean childish phantasies slumbering in the 
last analysis behind this. It is interesting how strikingly the poet 
is able to point out that double emotion in Eisener's soul. 

There the moral restraining impulses were first crowded back 
by the wine plentifully pressed upon him, which he, accustomed 
from his early years to moderation, could tolerate in only the small- 
est amount. Now " the sly Julie seemed to him ever more charm- 
ing. A play of glances began between the two, which appeared to 
make the young hunter jealous. On the other hand Eisener himself 
felt something similar when his neighbor on the left addressed to 
the earnest Maria words which did not conceal the liking she had 
inspired. He listened to her replies almost with fear and was de- 
lighted that there was not audible in them the least response to this 
inclination, and then he wondered at himself over this same division 
in his nature. In Julie's dark eyes glowed a flame, of which he 
felt how it kindled him and that its fire must attract more and more 
to itself without his being able to defend himself from it, yes, with- 
out his wishing to be able to do it." To be sure when " the slender 
Maria stood like a holy picture behind Julie, the alluring child of 
the world with all her seductive graces sank low in value in contrast 
to the former. He felt the need to be open with himself." Trans- 
parency was a necessity to him from his youth, as an inheritance 
from his wise mother. " Then Breitung thrust with his glass 
against Eisener's refilled one. Laughing and drinking he found 
the motley interchange of the liveliest ideas outwardly, which already 
had taken the place of quiet thought, soon becoming less and less 
menacing and finally even agreeable and desirable." 

His sexual excitement, heightened besides through the plentiful 
indulgence in alcohol and the general boisterousness, was brought 
to a high pitch by an episode with the passionate Julie. Eisener 
had to leave the room with her during a social game. " A strange 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 79 

thing happened to him, for as he bent down in the adjoining room 
in the dark to the quick breathing Julie, instead of her ear her burn- 
ing mouth met his mouth, and the soft pulsating form fell as if 
fainting into his arms. Wrestling with himself, striving to keep his 
senses, he seized her arm involuntarily and stood again with her in 
the assembly room before he was conscious what it was all about." 

Is not this behavior of the youth burning with desire peculiarly 
strange? What if behind it there is fixed a memory perhaps of a 
scene with the mother, who brought him to his senses by seizing his 
arm? Yet, it might always be so for him, he had found the power 
once more to withstand the hot temptation. Not to be sure without 
subsequent regret. For when he later sought his room he could 
not go to sleep and " his phantasy conjured up again, as often as he 
resisted it, that dark room about him and the bewitching Julie in 
his arms. He regretted a thousand times, so much did he distress 
himself, his joy at his instinctive flight, that he had not drunk that 
sweet poison to the full, whose mere touch had brought his whole 
being to this feverish pulsation." 

He sought now to find cooling for his heated blood in the garden, 
and in fact the fragrance of the flowers and the rustling of the 
leaves so soothed his excited mind that gradually the sense of a 
pleasant languor came over him. In a half unconsciousness he went 
upstairs again and back to bed. He was just falling asleep when 
he saw a white form enter, whose features he could not make out 
because of his shortsightedness. As it disrobed and came toward 
him, he first, as if seeking for help, reached with his hands toward 
the side where his friend should be sleeping. He did not however 
find him, he apparently had been put into another room. "The 
thought of being alone for the first time with a womanly being in 
the security of night crept over him at first like icecold drops, then 
like the glow of fire over all his nerves. His heart pounded audibly 
as the figure climbed into his bed. The strangeness and adventure 
of the situation was not fitted to work rationally upon the intox- 
icated man, whose excitement throbbed into his finger tips. The 
power of the warning inner voice disappeared with his reason and 
the strife was brief before nature came off conqueror." 

I have before this sketched Maria's character development up 
to the time when Eisener came into her life. Yet one point may be 
added. She had retained one single influence from her childhood in 
spite of all change in her seventh year, which "with the begin- 
ning of maturity appeared only occasionally and as it were in secret. 



80 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

The moon had been her dearly beloved and her desire; as a small 
child she had been able to look at the moon for hours without inter- 
mission. If she was sick her mother or nurse must carry her to the 
window through which she might look upon the friend of her small 
soul." About half a year before her acquaintance with Eisener 
"the moon had made its influence felt upon her sleep, as it had 
before affected her waking. At the time of the full moon she often 
left her couch, dressed herself and went up into the corner room 
in the pavilion. Here she stood for some time and turned her closed 
eyes toward the moon. Then she dropped the curtain, undressed 
and lay down in the bed, which stood in the spot where she had been 
used to sleep as a child. As soon as the moon had left the windows 
of this room or shone through the windows of her present sleeping 
room, she arose again, dressed herself and returned. She herself 
knew nothing of these wanderings, and whatever was done to 
awaken her during them was in vain. The physician thought that 
these attacks of moon walking would disappear finally when matur- 
ity was established, or at least at her first confinement." 

In this picture from a layman are some new and striking fea- 
tures. First is the love — one can call it nothing else — which the 
child betows upon the planet. Why is the moon her beloved and 
her desire from childhood up, why can she stand by the hour look- 
ing at it, why does she long when sick to be laid so that she can look 
at it all the time? He who observes children knows that such ex- 
treme love, which endures for years without wearying of it, and 
finally that ability to stare steadily at the moon, must have a sexual 
content, although naturally no one will admit this. Only when the 
object, in our case the heavenly body, is sexually stimulating is the 
love for it enduring for all time, undergoing no change, no abate- 
ment of feeling for it. As Maria's erotism later found satisfaction 
in her father, her love toward the moon steadily receded. But at 
the entrance upon puberty her sexual impulse increased and she 
began to wander in the moonlight. The love finally which Eisener 
inspires in her, together with the strong sexual excitement, which 
the fete the day before had called forth in her, occasions again an 
attack, in which she surrenders herself willingly to the beloved. 

The folk, like the family physician, have not a doubt of the 
sexual basis of the moon mania with her as with individuals in gen- 
eral. When puberty is established or she has a child of her own 
the attacks will cease, is the opinion of the latter. The servant maid 
Grete also, a living book of fairy tales among her people, explains 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 8 1 

the moon wandering as nothing else than the result of an unsatis- 
fied sense desire. There was a young knight who had wooed a rich 
woman of gentle birth. Shortly before midnight they were both 
led into the bridal chamber. " Yet hardly were they alone together 
when a strange voice outside before the castle called, ' Conrad, come 
down here ! Conrad, come down here ! ' And again it called, ' Con- 
rad, come down here ! ' The voice sounded so plaintive and at the 
same time so threatening. The bridegroom said, ' That is my best 
friend ; he is in need and calls me.' The maiden said however, ' The 
voice belongs to my cousin, who was found dead two years ago.' 
Then she shuddered so that the gooseflesh stood up over her whole 
body," and she implored her bridegroom not to follow the evil 
spirit or at least to remain with her until the ghostly hour was past 
and the full moon was up. But he would not be restrained : " Be it 
an evil spirit or a good, no one shall call me in vain!" "And he 
went out. The lady went to the window but could see nothing for 
the darkness outside and for the tears in her eyes. Then the haunted 
hour was over and the full moon arose and she waited and waited, 
but the knight never returned. Thereupon she swore to take no rest 
on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with 
her bridegroom. And as her first bridegroom never and nevermore 
came back, so she waited for another, but there was no one who 
knew her story who would woo her, because each one thought it 
would fare with him as it had fared with that other. Thus she died ; 
her oath is however still unfulfilled. Whenever it is full moon, she 
is looking out to see if any bridegroom comes and she laments sorely, 
and holds her hands weeping toward the moon." 

In this folk tale the exclusively sexual foundation of the wan- 
dering is quite plainly expressed. The ghost makes use of a voice, 
complaining and threatening at the same time, which the bridegroom 
believes to be the call for help of his best friend, and the bride on 
the other hand imagines it the voice of her cousin, who had been 
found dead two years before, perhaps after she had taken her own 
life because unhappy in love. Both may be driven by sexual jeal- 
ousy — I offer this as a hypothesis — which would not permit the 
other sexual gratification which is denied to himself or herself, the 
friend perhaps meaning jealousy from a homosexual tendency. 
The ghost having accomplished its purpose at the hour of midnight 
and in the light of the full moon, the lady swore " to take no rest on 
a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her 
bridegroom." That is the kernel of the entire myth, the naive and 



82 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

yet apparently conclusive folk interpretation of the riddle of moon 
walking, at least in its most frequent form. 

I have above taken it for granted that Maria's erotism was satis- 
fied through her care for her father. That must of course be un- 
derstood with some qualification. For she could play the role of 
mother only as housekeeper, not as wife. The former is satisfying 
therefore only so long, until stronger sexual impulses awaken 
through external stimuli or, according to rule, through the natural 
development of a maiden. When once that has come to pass, one 
so disposed to it as Maria was, begins to wander in the moonlight. 
Why then, it may further be asked, does Maria seek for her child- 
hood bed, if the goal and the aim of the wandering is the sexual 
satisfaction of the maiden? In the case analyzed at the beginning 
the compelling motive was a sexual self stimulation upon the mother, 
in later years in the loved object whoever it was, male or female. 
In most cases, since normal sexual feeling predominates, the aim of 
the sleep walking is that of the folk tale, to go to bed with the lover. 
That would explain without difficulty the scene of the union in 
Maria's case, as soon as she had come to know Eisener. 

But what lay specially at the foundation of her earlier wan- 
dering, when no man had yet made an impression upon her? Or 
was there perhaps one, in relation to whom sexuality is most 
strongly forbidden, her own father? What if her erotic desire 
toward him was repressed and the indifference which she had at- 
tained was transferred over to all men? Much that is apparently 
harmless is permitted to a child, which would be regarded with 
horror in the adult. Many parents like to take their children into 
bed early in the morning and play with them without any con- 
sciously sexual thoughts and without suspecting how very often 
they in this way stimulate sexual desire in their children. Fre- 
quently also the mother or father visit the child before going to 
sleep, lean over the bed, allow themselves often to press the child 
passionately to themselves and count this asexual love toward the 
child. The case analyzed at the beginning teaches us how much of 
the grossly sexual erotic is concealed behind this, even if well hidden. 
Maria likewise sought presumably in her sleep walking for the bed 
of her childhood because her earliest erotism was bound with it. 

This had already happened under the instigation of puberty, 
before her heart had spoken. How is it now since she loves Eisener ? 
We must keep in mind her unconscious wish, to climb into the bed 
of the man she loves, and on the other hand that Maria as house- 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 83 

mother knew well that he was not sleeping alone, but with his 
friend, so only a compromise form of action would be possible. So 
she goes up again to her childhood room, which lies in the same di- 
rection as Eisener's sleeping room. There she first draws the curtain 
aside that she may gaze at the moon, which increases the sexual ex- 
citement with her, as I have earlier discussed. Then she undresses 
before the mirror as she probably had done as a child, and moves 
forward toward the beloved one, who after a brief struggle with 
himself embraces her passionately. She nevertheless submits to 
his caresses without response but also without resistance. For thus 
alone can the fiction be maintained that she has loved without con- 
sciousness of it and therefore also without culpability. It is not 
difficult, according to the analysis of the first case, to understand 
how she finally at the withdrawal of the moonlight gets up again, 
dresses herself before the mirror and leaves the room as noiselessly 
as she had entered it. 

The later portions of the narrative must confirm my assump- 
tions if they are correct, that Eisener merely embraces the mother 
in Maria and that she on the other hand knows well enough in the 
unconscious both as child and as maiden that she wishes for that 
which is sexually forbidden and knows whom she desires. Let 
us see what the poet tells us. As Eisener awakes after the bridal 
night, he is not at all invigorated and uplifted as otherwise a man 
in like case, but psychically and physically cast down, as if he had 
to atone for some great wrong. " He strove to consider the strange 
adventure of this night as the delusion of a fevered dream. Yet 
that adventure painted itself before him, in spite of all his effort to 
forget it, in ever more vivid colors," because indeed a wish of his 
heart had been fulfilled through it. His inner unrest drove him 
forth and, as walking about he met his beloved, he marveled " that 
Maria seemed taller to him today than yesterday, or rather that he 
believed that he first noticed today that she was tall." What could 
this mean except that Maria now seemed big to him as once the 
mother had seemed to the small boy ? Only he had first to embrace 
his beloved, before he could perceive such a thing and give heed to 
it. Maria herself, who apparently had enjoyed her pleasure only 
in her sleep and unconsciously, and therefore knew nothing of it 
all, had lost her frank manner with him, which she still possessed 
the day before. She grew red at his look and drew the hand which 
she gave him " quickly back again in confused fear," without con- 
sciously knowing why. " The flower of womanhood which had 



84 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

slumbered in her too serene, too cold image, appeared in this one 
night to have come with magic swiftness to bud and immediately to 
have unfolded in all its fragrance." Maria herself pictures her 
condition : " That morning I can never forget. Everything was so 
still, so solemn ; the guests were all yet asleep. I had never been so 
strong of heart. I felt that morning as if all my life before had 
been only a dream and life was now just beginning. It seemed to 
me that I had suddenly become grown up and was now for the first 
time a child no more. Maria thus felt herself through the bridal 
night to have grown up from the child to the mother, only, now, it 
was for the lover who had taken the father's place. 

Both Eisener and Maria conducted themselves further entirely 
in accordance with their earlier unconscious wishes. The former 
for example " found a growing pleasure in representing his own 
action, when it was really the effect of many circumstances acting 
one upon the other, as the result of a cold, calm calculation on 
his part." And was it not at bottom actually something like a cal- 
culation, since he in his earliest childhood phantasies imagined 
something similar for himself from the mother? It is only natural 
that he now greatly exaggerated in consciousness the sin which he 
had desired. Never for a moment did it occur to him "to throw 
any part of the burden of guilt upon that being who so closely par- 
ticipated in it. His rightful feeling remained in regard to it that 
he had this night given to a woman a right to himself, which he, if 
she should demand it, could not dispute. It was a source of calm- 
ness to him to look upon himself as punished, as it were, in this 
manner." Only all to evident! This punishment was in reality a 
disguised reward, fulfilment of the infantile wish to win the 
mother. 24 For this reason he had not been able earlier to withstand 
Julie although Maria attracted him far more. For the former was 
the indulgent mother of his power of imagination, the latter on the 
contrary the proud, unapproachable mother of his real childhood. 
Moreover, though he did not conceal from himself that his heart 
belonged to the chaste Maria, yet he resolved, if Julie should con- 
vince him that she had been the ghostly visitor, to offer her his hand 
immediately. " The doubt, whether she deserved it, which was near 
enough at hand, he put from him as an excuse which he wished to 
make so that he could believe that he might release himself from 

24 Cf. with this also the interesting passage ..." the passionate self accu- 
sations, in torturing himself with which he found comfort a short time 
before." 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 85 

that which he had to recognize as his duty." Maria however "he 
had in these days accustomed himself to think of as a being so high 
above him that his love must profane her." Again the well known 
splitting of the mother into the holy and the yielding one. 

How did it appear at this time to her, herself ? The first weeks 
after that moonlight night the woman in her bloomed forth more 
and more, in spite of the fact that her lover tarried at a distance. 
Yet when in her body a new life began to develop and Eisener still 
did not appear, she was seized suddenly with a hysterical convul- 
sion — she was wearing significantly the same rose-colored dress in 
which he had seen her that morning — which lasted twelve hours so 
that every one looked upon her as dead. The despairing father 
threw himself across her feet and lay there — a situation which will 
occupy us later — and Eisener, who was just now returning, was 
driven by the bitterest self reproaches across the ocean. After 
waking from her catalepsy Maria did not regain her former bloom- 
ing health but grew more and more ill, which the family physician 
finally discovered as the result of her pregnancy. 

"The good girl herself believed at first that what she felt and 
what they told her was a vivid troubled dream." This idea will not 
appear strange to us who know so much about moon walking and 
that one does everything merely "in sleep" in order to remain 
blameless. " That she should become a mother seemed to her so 
strange and wonderful that she appeared to herself as some one 
else (this might well read, as her own mother dead at so early an 
age) or as suddenly transplanted into another world with strange 
people, animals and trees. The sound of her own voice, the tone of 
the bells seemed to her as other and strange sounds." We may 
bring forward in explanation in this place the case analyzed at the 
beginning, where a moon walker had abandoned herself to all sorts 
of dreams. In the moon must be living men of another sort with 
other feelings, customs and manners, and the sexual, strongly for- 
bidden upon earth, must be freely permitted upon this planet. She 
seemed to herself on account of her sexual phantasies already as a 
child quite different from other people, as if she belonged not upon 
this earth but upon the moon. Could not a similar thought process 
have taken place with Maria? 

I said of her father, that he had been her first beloved. And it 
comes almost as an unconscious recognition of this when he, filled 
with anger, calls out to her mockingly, "Why do you not say that 
the whole affair has come to pass out of love to me, to prepare for 



86 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

me an unexpected joy?" Breitung also enjoyed since her earliest 
childhood her unlimited confidence only on this account because he 
loved her as his own child. Therefore she looks up with all her 
anxiety so trustfully and self confidently to this friend of her father. 
But when Breitung also no longer believed in her and her father 
turned from her with scorn it was " as if all her blood streamed into 
her eyes that, pressing out as tears, it might relieve her. Yet here it 
remained and pressed upon her brain as if threatening its fibers. 
With a strangely fearful haste she pressed her eyes with her fingers ; 
they remained dry; a cry of pain would unburden her soul — no 
sound accompanied the trembling, convulsive breathing. The old 
servant, who entered after a while, found her lying with her breast 
upon the sofa pillow, her head thrown violently back," in hysterical 
opisthotonos. " The old man had loved Maria from her earliest 
childhood" and stood accordingly in the place of a father. "He 
clasped his hands together in distress. She recognized him and suf- 
fered him patiently to bring her head to a less forced position. She 
looked at him sharply as if she would convince herself that he was 
the one she took him to be. His Kalmuck features seemed to her as 
beautiful as the soul which they hid and seemed to want to disown. 

The friendliness, the affectionate regard, which spoke so unmis- 
takably out of the familiar old graybearded, sunburnt face, did her 
no end of good. Since she could not yet entirely believe she asked, 
" Is it indeed you, Justin ? And you will still recognize me ? And 
you do not flee from me?" At first the deplorable commission 
which the old man had to carry out threw her back again. When 
she had to understand that her father would not again set foot in 
the pastor's house until she had departed, her countenance became 
deathly pale and convulsive movements trembled in quick succession 
over her delicate body so that the old man wept aloud, for he be- 
lieved that she had gone mad. His signs of distress, the faithfulness 
and love which spoke through them, touched her so effectually that 
at last the hysterical convulsion relaxed and she sank down. " The 
old man caught her up. He placed her on the sofa. She lay across 
his lap ; her head lay upon his left hand, with the other he held her 
body fast that it should not slip to the floor. It seemed as if she 
would weep her whole weary self away. The old servant held her 
with trembling hand and heavy heart." Now the scene of childhood 
is complete, except that the old man plays the role of her father. 
So had Maria presumably done as a child when she felt too unhappy 
and so also the pastor's throwing himself down, as we saw above, 
over his daughter whom he believed dead, is not strange. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 87 

When Maria had left the parsonage her first thought and silent 
concern was how her father must now live without her care, even 
that perhaps he would not be there any more, when everything had 
later turned out well. Then she thought again of the time when 
she would be a mother and " her life seemed to her as a tale that is 
told." On her journey to her new home there came over her ever 
more strongly "the feeling of her complete abandonment. All the 
dear childhood memories, into whose protection she would flee, 
turned in anger from her. With tears she cried to God for a heart 
that she might love, some one for whom she might really care. For 
it seemed as if a curse lay upon her, which estranged all hearts from 
her. She thought with fear at her heart that the being to whom she 
would give life might likewise turn from her, as everything had 
done that she loved." Then a good fate brings to her the unfor- 
tunate Johannes whom his crazy father wished to throw into the 
water in order to preserve him for eternal happiness. At once 
Maria assumes the role of mother toward the boy and now "that 
once more she had to care for some one, she was again the calm and 
serene being." 

What had so thrown her out of her course ? It was not so much 
the banishment from the father's house, not the contempt of all the 
world, nor even of her very oldest and truest friend. She would 
have been able to look beyond both of these, because her conscious- 
ness felt itself entirely blameless. But she took so to herself 
the truth that she was no more the loving, caretaking house mother 
nor might play that part, that for a brief while she planned to take 
her life. She prayed to God with tears for one heart only that she 
might love, that she might actually care for. Since the care of her 
father is taken from her she feels herself at first truly and utterly 
forlorn, all the dear memories of childhood turn in anger from her 
and a curse seems to rest upon her soul. 

Why do all the memories of her childhood turn from her, if 
she actually knows herself guiltless? Is this merely because the 
father is indissolubly bound with them? If she still consciously 
feels entirely blameless toward him, and if he openly did her wrong 
from a false assumption, then should not the childhood memories 
return to her? I think the solution must be sought elsewhere, in 
this, that Maria knew nothing in clear consciousness of the happen- 
ings of that moonlight night and could honestly swear to that, but 
everything was known in the unconscious. Here is the sense of 
guilt engendered, of which consciousness may know nothing, here 

7 



bb SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

she knows well enough that the youthful Eisener has embraced her 
and she has together with him deceived the father whom she first 
loved. The goal of all moon walking is none other than to be able 
to enjoy and still be blameless, it is blamelessness because without 
accompanying consciousness. 

The poet's words must confirm this, if this assumption is correct. 
We will test them. The first night of her banishment Maria, while 
going to sleep, thought first of her father "who must go to bed 
without the little services which he was accustomed to receive from 
her." Then she thought of Breitung and the apothecary's daughter, 
who had turned from her full of scorn. " The young Eisener oc- 
curred to her in the midst of this, she knew not how, and a sort of 
curiosity whether Eisener also would have turned from her in so 
unfriendly a fashion as Breitung. She pictured to herself how he 
might have looked upon her now with contempt, now with friendli- 
ness, as on that morning which she so gladly remembered." Also 
an evident identification of the young Eisener with the father and 
the father's friend, and flight from the loved ones who had cast her 
off to him who had inclined to her as a friend. 

Yet more convincing is a passage which follows. Maria had 
born a son and " the more she looked with joy upon the small infant 
contemplating his sound and beautiful body, the more grew the need 
within her, only instinctively felt at first, to have some one who 
could rejoice in the child with her, not out of mere sympathy with 
her, but because he had the same right to it and so that she could 
rejoice again in his joy, as he might in hers. Without knowing how 
and why, she thought again of the friendly and true hearted Eisener. 
Her dreams brought his picture before her eyes in most vivid colors. 
It seemed as if it were Eisener who should enjoy the child with her. 
She hastened to him with tears of joy to lay the beautiful boy in his 
arms, and when she now stood by him, she had scarcely the heart 
to show him the boy. Then she cast down her eyes and said con- 
fusedly, " See this beautiful child, Eisener, Sir ! " Maria knew quite 
well in the unconscious that she had conceived her child from 
Eisener and the sudden restraint when she laid the boy in his arms 
is only a compromise with consciousness, which must not know the 
facts, otherwise she could not be spared her feeling of guilt. Yes, 
when Julie then came with her love child, which she had conceived 
that same moonlight night from the hunter, although she really 
loved Eisener, then " Maria experienced, she knew not why, a gentle 
aversion toward her. She said quietly, 'That in which one has 
done no wrong and cannot change, one must bear patiently.' " 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 89 

Soon however there awoke a desire in her " for something new, 
still unknown to her, which she nevertheless felt must come now. 
It was the strange, fearfully sweet condition of the ripeness of love, 
which had not yet found the object on which she could open her 
heart. That night a need awakened, formerly repressed into the 
background by greater pain, but which threatened now to outgrow 
other desires and feelings in the undisputed possession of him." 
Often she sat knitting and dreaming at the boy's cradle. "There 
was a fair at Marklinde. She went early in her rose-colored dress 
into the garden and plucked wild hedge roses. She was startled 
for she heard a noise behind her and she knew that it was Eisener 
who was coming after her. She turned into another path ; she was 
afraid to meet him, and yet she wished that he would follow her. 
As she bent low behind some flowers, she threw a hasty look behind 
her. She grew rosy because he might have noticed the look, and 
still it would have made her glad if he had noticed it. * Yet if he 
knew everything/ she whispered to herself ; ' but I could not tell 
him, nor could I let him perceive it. I would have to say No, al- 
though he understood it as Yes ! ' Suddenly he stood near her ; he 
had seized her hand and was looking into her eyes. She bowed her 
head, he bent toward her. It seemed so strange to her — their lips 
touched — Maria frightened and blushing, sprang involuntarily from 
her chair, as if what she was dreaming were real. 

"A strangely mingled feeling drove her from her chair to the 
window and from the window back to the chair. She felt herself 
stirred in her very depths by something which wounded her sensi- 
bility as much as it excited her longing. She fled to her child. She 
strove to think of something else ; in vain. That thought continually 
returned and gradually lost its frightful character. Soon she felt it 
only as a sweet dread and so the idea received a double stimula- 
tion while it woke the curious question, why and for what reason 
she must really be afraid. And as she looked now upon the child, 
it seemed to her so marvellous that she, mother and yet maiden, 
knew nothing of the happiness of which this little life must be the 
fruit. Julie's words were continually ringing in her ears, 'The 
happiness which is granted him, has to be reckoned too dear.' It 
gave her unending satisfaction, to think of herself actually in such 
a situation to the young Eisener that all her unhappiness was the 
result of a joy which she had granted him, without knowing what 
joy this must have been." I consider it superfluous to add a word 



90 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

to complete the interpretation of these phantasies, which speak for 
themselves. They confirm everything that I have said above, better 
than any labored explanation. Later Maria came to know that what 
had sustained her in the hours of her sorrow was nothing else than 
that mysterious but certain premonition of a happy life with Eisener 
and her George." 

And now back to the purpose of the analysis of all these tales. 
What does it teach us for the understanding of moon walking? 
First of all it confirms many of our earlier conclusions. The most 
important thing, in the first place, is that sexual impulses lie at the 
foundation, desire for sexual gratification, and that one apparently 
acts in sleep in order to escape all culpability, while the unconscious 
still knows all about it. The sleep walking begins, in accordance 
with the sexual basic motive, at the time of puberty and lasts until 
it is inhibited by the close of that period or in women with the birth 
of the first child. It is further established that at the beginning the 
bed of childhood is sought, the place of earlier sexual pleasures, 
later however the bed of the loved object, who appears in the place 
of the originally loved object, the parent. Finally, moreover, when 
the night wanderer fixes his closed eyes upon the moon before 
starting out on his wandering, erotic thoughts hide behind this, 
which in turn go back to earliest childhood. The heavenly body 
effects a sexual excitement not only through its light, but indeed 
also through sexual phantasies which are bound with it. Lastly 
folk myth knows likewise that the woman in white represents noth- 
ing else than the maiden in her night shift with all her sexual 
longings. 

One thing more this novel also confirms, which our earlier dis- 
coveries have already taught us, the abnormal muscle excitability 
and muscle erotic. For Maria was seized with a hysterical con- 
vulsion when her father's unkindness pressed itself upon her. It is 
interesting that this abnormal muscle excitability, which manifested 
itself in various muscular convulsions, was present with Otto Lud- 
wig throughout his earthly career. Already as a boy he often suf- 
fered convulsive muscular twitchings, when he had exceptional 
tasks to perform or hard thinking was required of him, and " nerv- 
ous twitchings of the head" are recorded of him when twenty- 
three years old, also presumably a tic had won for him the nickname 
of "the shaker." Later moreover our poet suffered chronically 
from convulsive manifestations of a lesser degree, repeatedly how- 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 9 1 

ever in a stronger, special form although only in temporary 
attacks. 25 

In other words, it may be said that Ludwig assigns to Maria 
and the young Eisener a series of his own personal characteristics. 
That is to say, not only was the tendency to convulsive attacks 
peculiar to him, but also to fainting, and a compulsive neurotic and 
hysterical tendency, the high grade myopia, a fondness for dis- 
cussing painting, talking with inanimate things, 26 colored audition, 
as well as other synesthesias, and finally a special reverence for his 
mother. 

" Buschnovelle/' by Otto Ludwig. 

The moon plays an important part in the romance just discussed, 
even apart from Maria's night wandering, and a number of sig- 
nificant events take place under its very light. We find this rela- 
tionship still stronger in Otto Ludwig's " Buschnovelle," briefly re- 
ferred to earlier, which I add here, though it really does not directly 
treat of our problems. The heroine Pauline passed with many as 
moon struck and her blue eyes " have a strange expression of their 
own. They gaze as aliens upon this world, as angels, which, trans- 
planted to our marvelous earth, belong to the heavenly home and 
cannot find themselves amid this confused and agitated humanity." 
Likewise his bride asserts of the count that he knows no other recre- 
ation " than to climb about in the night over the rocks and worship 
the moon.' , This perhaps gave occasion to the rumor of a ghost: 
or at least breathed new life into an old tale. 

A prince was banished under an enchantment to the rocks of the 
gods. He had "a face as of a person twenty years old or so, but 
pale and quite transparent like moonlight, and he could be rescued 
only through a maiden eighteen years old and as innocent as when 
she came from the mother's womb." The count, whom his bride 

25 Cf. with this especially Ernest Jentsch, "Das Pathologische bei Otto 
Ludwig," " Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens," published by L. 
Lowenfeld, No. 90. 

26 Cf . here the poet's words : " It is strange that nature is personified for 
me, that I not only live in her, but as one human being with another, ex- 
changing, not merely receiving, thoughts and feelings, and even so, that 
different places become as individual to me, distinct from others and, as it 
were, transformed in consciousness, so that I not only feel that they effect 
an influence upon me but it seems to me as if I work upon them, and the 
forms, as they appear to me, show the traces of this influence." Further: 
"I . . . who stood even in a wonderful mutual understanding with moun- 
tain and flora, because the kingdom of love was not to be restrained. . . ." 



92 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

deceived, became very melancholy over it and trusted no woman 
after this. He learned to know and love Pauline upon the rocks of 
the gods, where he was accustomed to wander in the moonlight. 
When she believed she saw in him the enchanted prince and de- 
clared her intention of voluntarily rescuing him, he stipulated that she 
must climb down from off the rocks, down from the cross, without 
touching them with her hands but holding her arms toward the full 
moon. " And that must take place tomorrow night when the moon 
is sailing overhead, otherwise I must remain enchanted. When you 
shall have climbed down the rocks, I shall be saved and then I will 
make you my princess." One may read afterward from the poet 
how Pauline then carried out her resolve — her determination alone, 
sprung evidently from a great love, had already cured the count of 
his sadness — how the count saved her and later wooed her. 

Emphasis will be laid here merely upon two facts, first that not 
only all important events happen in the light of the full moon, but 
that also no other novel shows so many autobiographical features. 
The most recent publisher of this tale, Heinrich Borcherdt, gives 
this explanation : " One can recognize without much trouble in the 
portrait of the count with his well-trimmed beard the poet himself, 
who at that time tended to great seriousness and to melancholy. 
For this very reason the cheerfulness, gaiety and unrestrained 
naturalness of his bride Emilie worked most refreshingly upon him. 
Pauline in the tale exercised a similar influence upon the count. 
What we know of Emilie Ludwig from without agrees likewise with 
the picture of Pauline. Pauline's father suggests Emilie's father. 
, . . The greatest weight will be laid upon the fact that we possess 
in this work a poetic glorification of Otto Ludwig's love happiness 
in Triebischtal. The rural life is reproduced in every detail." 
Nothing unfortunately is reported in the different sketches of his 
life whether and how far the poet and his bride allowed them- 
selves to be influenced by the light of the full moon. The striking 
fact remains at any rate that twice in the course of two years he 
spun out this theme and each time moreover with a strongly auto- 
biographical note. That cannot be sufficiently explained merely 
through the influence of Tieck, whom he, to be sure, read diligently 
in his youth. 

" Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum," by Theodor Mundt 

("Life's Magic, Reality and Dream"). 

In the seventh volume of the " Euphorion " Richard M. Meyer 
has exhumed a probable source of Ludwig's " Maria." It is a 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 93 

fictitious tale of the "young German" Theodor Mundt, which ap- 
peared in his collection " Charaktere und Situationen" in 1837, five 
years before the " Maria," and shows in fact some external sim- 
ilarities with this. Still Otto Ludwig expressly acknowledges a 
tale told by a friend as the source, but gives no syllable of mention 
to Mundt. I must say that it seems at least very questionable that 
the latter's story was the model, although the Berlin literary his- 
torian comes to the conclusion, "A direct utilization would be here 
difficult to dispute." I will reproduce the contents of this story, as 
far as it touches our problems, as closely as possible in the words of 
Mundt, although this story, which is contained in the collection men- 
tioned under the separate title of " Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und 
Traum," hardly possesses an artistic value. 

The theological student Emil Hahn had, as one of his friends 
states, "lost life itself over his books and before his merry com- 
panions, who would have initiated him into the true enjoyment of 
existence, crowed many a moral cock-a-doodle-doo of virtue and 
self restraint." On the ride home to his father and foster sister 
Rosalinde he was urged by two student acquaintances to a little 
drinking bout, at which he partook of more wine than was good for 
him. The two comrades sang the praises of Rosalinde, whom Hahn 
had left as a fourteen year old girl and who in the two years of 
separation had blossomed out in full beauty. As Hahn returned to 
the father's house in a half intoxicated state and met Rosalinde in 
an adjacent room, he found at once, in contrast to his shyness of 
former times, the courage to approach her. " Ardently and daringly 
he embraced her and the passionate kiss which he impressed upon 
her maidenly lips was followed, as one lightning flash succeeds an- 
other, by a second more lingering one, which was reluctant to leave 
off." After he had for some time, again quite contrary to his cus- 
tom, held his own place at the large party which his father was giv- 
ing that very evening, " he felt himself gradually seized with weari- 
ness and the lively and excited mood, to which the wine he had en- 
joyed had awakened him, began little by little to disappear with the 
intoxication. He made his adieus in a dejected tone and betook 
himself with heavy, hanging head to his room, there to recover him- 
self through sleep, which he could no longer withstand because of 
his painful state. 

"It was late in the night when Emil sprang from his bed. A 
vivid dream seemed to have confused and frightened him. He 



94 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

stood half clothed in the middle of his room and stared straight 
ahead as if trying to recollect himself. Above in the night sky- 
glowed the full round moon with a sharp ray seldom seen and its 
white silver light pierced directly over the head of the youth walking 
in his sleep. The room gleamed brightly in the moonbeams trem- 
bling with mystery, which had spun themselves out in long, glim- 
mering threads over floor and ceiling. Emil had fastened his eyes 
upon the great disk of the moon and staggered with uncertain steps 
to the window to open it." While he stood thus there came a small 
snow white cat — the cat is well known as a favorite animal of the 
romantic writers — and spoke to him: "I am come to congratulate 
you on your bridal night. Yes, yes, I know well that you are mar- 
ried. This is a beautiful night to be married. The moon shoots 
down right warmly, and its strong shining stings the blood and we 
cats also feel the impulses stirring in the whispering May night. 
Happy one, you who are married ! Married to Rosalinde ! " 

" Emil, distracted, clasped his forehead. Everything which he 
saw about him appeared to him changed and even the inanimate 
things in his vicinity seemed in this moment to have been drawn into 
a magic alliance. Everything, the very table, chair, press looked at 
him, rocking themselves saucily in the bright moonlight, personally 
and familiarly, and had to his eyes, arms and feet to move about, 
mouths to speak with, senses for communication. At the same time 
a fair picture rose before the youth deep out of the bottom of his 
heart, at which he smiled longingly. It was the recollection of 
Rosalinde and her matured beauty. She passed like a burning, 
ominous dream through his soul and he felt himself drunken, trem- 
bling, exultingly united with the proud but now subdued maiden in 
a love thrilled bridal night. While he was thus lost in thought his 
look was held chained by a painting, which hung on the wall oppo- 
site him. Strange, it was Rosa's portrait and he knew not whether 
this picture had just now arisen warm with life merely out of the 
force of the idea which was kindling him, or whether it had actually 
been formed over there in its golden frame by a painter's hand." 
Then the cat mewed again: "That is your young wife Rosalinde. 
The moonbeam chases her; see how its brightness kisses her tem- 
ples unceasingly. The young woman is queen on her bridal night. 
We will crown her, all we who are here in this room and owe our 
life to the brightness of the moonlight night, we will crown her. 
I present her for her bridal crown burning, tender desires." Then 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 95 

the May blossoms in the room bestirred themselves and conferred 
upon her the bloom of fond innocence for her bridal crown. Also 
the bird in the cage made himself understood : " I give her for her 
bridal crown the score of my latest melody. Harmony and melody 
should be the dower of all young brides.' , Finally a cockchafer 
also which flew in offered her for her bridal crown " a pair of lovely 
crickets. " 

"The dreaming Emil, surrounded by these fairy treasures of 
the May night, stood in sweet intoxication opposite the glowing 
picture, bathed in moonlight, of the maiden to whom all this homage 
belonged. The longer and the more vividly he pictured to himself 
and leaned toward all the maidenly charms, which had allowed the 
first passionate wish in the young man's phantasy to blaze up, the 
more an impatience, almost consuming, pounding, benumbing his 
heart, seized him, which he did not know how to explain and had 
never felt before in his life. Like a seductively sweet poison the 
delusion imparted itself secretly to him that Rosalinde was his 
bride, his wife, and that this wondrously beautiful spring night, 
bright with moonlight, was his wedding night. His heart swelled 
with mighty, growing desire, youthful passion breathed high in him. 
Trembling, fearful, wavering, longing, he still felt himself strangely 
happy. 

" Then it seemed to him that Rosalinde's picture began to move, 
as if the gleaming shoulders lifted themselves gradually and gently 
at first from it. Then the delicate outline of the bosom rose as 
the lovely form came forth, the face streaming with love bowed 
itself in modest shame before him. The form grew larger, rose to 
full beauty, stretched itself to life size. Smiling, beckoning, gazing 
at him full of mystery, promising favor and happiness, she took 
some steps toward him, then fled back again ashamed and as if 
frightened, floated away with sylphlike movements to the door and 
remained hidden behind it, yet peeping and looking out at the youth. 

" He did not know if he should, if he might follow her. He was 
drawn powerfully after her and yet he stood still and hesitated. 
The bright noonlight seemed, like a fairy toward one enchanted, to 
make merry at the loud anxious beating of his heart. He restrained 
himself no longer; with a passionate movement he hastened with 
open arms to the beloved apparition, desiring to embrace her, throw 
himself upon her bosom, breathe out upon her his burning desire. 
She fled, he followed her. She fled before him, but softly and 
alluringly and he, intoxicated, rushed after her from room to room 



q6 sleep walking and moon walking 

unable to overtake the form flitting on with ghostly swiftness. Like 
a star drawing him onward she floated there before him, his foot- 
steps were as if bewitched by her ruuning, and thus she led him 
after her, on and on, through a succession of rooms, so that he mar- 
veled and thought himself wandering about in a great, unfamiliar 
enchanted palace. 

"At last he saw her no more, the lovely picture had suddenly 
disappeared from him. He must however still hasten and hasten, 
there was no rest for him. He no longer knew himself what he was 
seeking and what he hoped to find. But now he ran upon a door; 
it opened and he entered a small, cosy room in which stood a white 
bed. Seized with a strange apprehension the youth drew back the 
curtains with bold hand, and looked, astonished, smiling, burning 
with bliss. There lay a beautiful maiden asleep and dreaming — ah ! 
it was Rosalinde herself. In the sweet forgetfulness of sleep, un- 
veiling herself like the outblown petals of a rosebud, she revealed 
her most secret charms in lovely fulness to the eye of night. Emil 
stood before her in the dear delusion of aroused passion and bent 
over her. 'Is not tonight my bridal night?', thought he. He re- 
flected and the hot tumult of exulting senses tore him irresistibly. 
Then he flung himself passionately into her arms, pressed his mouth 
to her mouth in yearning kisses and clung closer and closer to the 
warm, living delight of her charming form. He dared the boldest 
work of love. The sleeper did not oppose the daring beginning ; in 
the power of a dream, like him, according to the myth, whom the 
chaste Luna had seized, she seemed at first to yield softly to the 
seductive moment. Only a glowing color suffused the tender cheek, 
a gentle halting exclamation breathed through the half open lips. 
The bright light of the full moon shone on high with its trembling 
beams directly over the couch of the maiden. 

" Now, now however she awakes from the strange troubled 
dream. She opens her eyes, she shakes her beautiful head as if 
she would free herself from the fetters of a dark enchantment. 
With a loud outcry she beholds herself actually in the young man's 
arms and sees alas ! that she has not dreamed it. Wildly with all 
the strength of horror she pushes him from her, springs up and 
stands wringing her hands distracted before him, her fluttering hair 
only half disclosing her frightened countenance. Then she calls 
him by name in a tone indescribably piercing, painfully questioning, 
' Emil ! ' He in turn, hearing himself called by name, falls at the 
same moment with a faint sigh swooning to the floor. After a pause 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 97 

he raises himself up, rubs his eyes and looks wonderingly about him. 
He cannot comprehend how he has come here. The influence of 
the moon has permitted the poor night wanderer to experience this 
adventure. When he was completely awake and had come to him- 
self, he stood up and began to think over his situation. Then his 
eye fell astonished upon Rosalinde, who continued to stare at him 
speechless and immovable. Shame and anger adorned with a deep 
glowing color the injured maiden, whose virgin whiteness had been 
sullied by the strange events of this night. A dark, frightening 
recollection of what had taken place flashed now like a remote, 
faded dream into Emil's consciousness. The alluring spirits of the 
night, which had buzzed around him, now mockingly stripped from 
him the deceitful mask. 

" ' Go, go, go ! ' called Rosalinde finally, who could no longer 
bear his look. ' Go ! ' she called and stretched out her hand with a 
passionate movement toward him, as if she would with it jerk a 
reeking dagger from her breast. ' Go, go ! ' she repeated, sobbing 
and beseeching. Then she hid her aching head with a loud outbreak 
of tears. Emil slipped away heartbroken and in despair. He was 
in such a state, when he reached his own room, that he would have 
put a ball through his head, had there been at that moment a pistol 
at hand." How Rosalinde then became pregnant and in spite of 
her resistance toward Emil, still married him to reestablish her 
honor, how though after the wedding feast two acquaintances of 
the young husband, whom he had not invited, played him so mis- 
chievous a trick that he lost his reason in consequence, that de- 
serves no further rendering. 

We find here also as the nucleus of moon walking, when we 
strip from the foregoing all its mystical setting, the longing to ap- 
proach the love object and there to be able to indulge oneself with- 
out punishment because it is done unconsciously. The literary his- 
torian Richard M. Meyer regards it quite correctly: "Theodor 
Mundt believed that he had emphasized something new in his way 
of presenting it. ' The influence of the moon had caused the night 
wanderer to undergo this adventure.' " To be sure Mundt attributes 
all sorts of mystical-romantic rubbish to the action of the heavenly 
body. 

" Der Prinz von Homburg/' by Heinrich von Kleist. 

Heinrich von Kleist also like Ludwig carried night wandering 
and moon walking into material at hand. We know that Kleist not 



98 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

long before the origin of the " Prinz von Homburg " under Schu- 
bert's influence occupied himself very much with the "night side 
of the natural sciences" and Wukadinovic has made it also ap- 
parent that the poet went still deeper, back to one of Schubert's 
sources, to Reil's "Rhapsodien uber die Anwendung der psychi- 
schen Kurmethode auf Geisteszerriittungen." 27 There he found a 
number of features which he then interwove into his drama, al- 
though by no means all that he permitted his moonstruck hero to 
do. The matter of the drama is presumably so well known that I 
content myself here with giving the mystical setting and the begin- 
ning and end of the action. 

Wearied with a long ride, the Prince von Homburg throws him- 
self down to sleep that he may obtain a little rest before the great 
battle in which he is about to engage. In the morning when they 
seek the leader they find him sitting on a bench in the castle park 
of Fehrbellin, whither the moonlight had enticed the sleep walker. 
He sits absorbed with bared head and open breast, " Both for him- 
self and his posterity, he dreams the splendid crown of fame to 
win." Still further, the laurel for this crown he himself must have 
obtained during the night from the electoral greenhouse. The 
electress thinks, " As true as I'm alive, this man is ill ! " an opinion 
in which the princess Natalie concurs. " He needs the doctor." But 
Hohenzollern, his best friend, answers coolly, " He is perfectly 
well. It is nothing but a mere trick of his mind." 

Meanwhile the prince has finished winding the wreath and re- 
gards it idly. Then the elector is moved to see how far the former 
would carry the matter and he takes the laurel wreath out of his 
hand. " The prince grows red and looks at him. The elector throws 
his necklace about the wreath and gives it to the princess; the 
prince stands up roused. The elector withdraws with the princess, 
who holds up the wreath; the prince follows her with outstretched 
arms." And now he betrays his inmost wish, " Natalie ! my girl, 
my bride ! " In vain the astonished elector, " Go, away with you ! " 
for the prince turns also to him, " Friedrich, my prince, my father !" 
And then to the electress, " O my mother ! " She thinks wonder- 
ingly, "Whom is it he thus names?" Yet the prince reaches after 
the laurel wreath, saying, "Dearest Natalie, Why run away from 
me?" and really seizes her gloves rather than the wreath. The 

27 Rhapsodies over the Employment of the Psychical Method of Treat- 
ment for Mental Disturbances." See Critical Historical Review by W. A. 
White, Journ. Nerv. and Ment. Dis., Vol. 43, No. 1. [Tr.] 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 99 

elector however disappearing with his retinue behind the gates calls 

to him: 

" Away, thou prince of Homburg, get thee back, 
Naught here for thee, away! The battle's field 
Will be our meeting place, when't pleases thee ! 
No man obtains such favors in his dreams ! " 

" The prince remains standing a moment with an expression of 
wonder before the door, then pondering descends from the terrace, 
laying his hand, in which he holds the glove, before his forehead, 
turns as soon as he is below and looks again toward the door." 
Out of this state the Hohenzollern returning awakens him. At 
the word " Arthur " the moonstruck prince collapses. " No better 
could a bullet have been aimed." Afterward of course he makes 
up some story in regard to his sleep walking, that he had slipped 
into the garden on account of the great heat. Only the princess's 
glove recalls to him what has happened in his sleep : 

"What is this dream so strange that I have dreamed? 
For all at once, with gold and silver gleaming, 
A royal castle flung its portals wide. 
While from the marble terraced heights above 
Thronged down to me the happy dancers all ; 
Among them those my love has held most dear. 
Elector and elect'ress, and — who is the third? 
— What name to call her ? " 

For the name of the princess there is amnesia, as well as for 
the reason for his moon walking. Then he continues : 

" And he, the elector, with brow of mighty Zeus, 
A wreath of laurel holds within his hand. 
And pressing close before my very face 
Plucks from his neck the chain that's pendant there. 
His hand outstretched he sets it on my locks, 
My soul meanwhile enkindled high." 

Now again the complete forgetting of the loved one's name. He 
can only say: 

" High up, as though to deck the brow of fame, 
She lifts the wreath, on which the necklace swings, 
To crown a hero, so her purpose seems. 
With eager movement I my hands outstretch, 
No word, mere haste to seize it in my grasp. 
Down would I sink before her very feet. 



100 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

Yet, as the fragrance over valleys spread 

Is scattered by the wind's fresh blowing breath, 

Along the sloping terrace flees the throng. 

I tread the ramp — unending, far away 

It stretches up to heaven's very gate, 

I clutch to right, I clutch to left, and fear 

No one of all the treasures to secure, 

No one of all the dear ones to retain. 

In vain — the castle's door is rudely closed; 

A flash of brightness from within, then dark, 

The doors once more swing clatteringly together. 

And I awaking hold within my hand 

Naught but a glove, alas ! as my reward, 

Torn from the arm of that sweet dream caught form 

A glove, ye Gods of power, only this ! " 

It is evident that there is complete memory of the latter part of 
his night wandering up to the name of the beloved maiden, al- 
though he thinks, "One dumb from birth to name her would be 
able ! " Only once, when he was dreaming by himself, he was on the 
way toward recollecting the repressed name. He turns even to the 
Hohenzollern : 

" I fain would ask you, my dear friend, 
The electress, her fair niece, are they still here 
The lovely princess of the House of Orange, 
Who lately had arrived at our encampment? ' 

But he was cut off briefly by his friend, " Eh, what ! this long 
while they've been gone." The same friend had however to ex- 
plain in detail later, when he appeared before the elector in behalf 
of the prince condemned to death : 

" When I awoke him and his wits he gathered, 
A flood of joy the memory roused in him; 
In truth, no sight more touching could you find! 
At once the whole occurrence, like a dream 
He spread before me, drawn with finest touch. 
So vivid, thought he, have I never dreamed. — 
And firmer still within him grew belief 
On him had Heaven a favoring sign bestowed; 
With all, yes all his inner eye had seen, 
The maiden, laurel crown and noble jewels, 
Would God reward him on the battle's day." 

We see here plainly that the kernel of the supposed dream 
belonging to the night wandering is wish fulfilment, desire for glory 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 10 1 

and the hand of the beloved. It agrees very well with this concep- 
tion that the prince himself takes the laurel from the gardener's 
forcing house to wind a wreath of honor for himself. He looks at 
it with admiring eyes and puts it upon himself, playing the role of 
being beloved, only the elector and Natalie come in to interfere. 
The princess and the laurel, also love and fame really hypnotize 
him and draw him magnetically. The prince follows them both 
with outstretched arms until the elector and Natalie disappear 
behind the gates. It seems to me very significant that not long 
before the creation of this drama a crowning with laurel at the 
hands of a loved one had actually taken place in the life of the poet 
and that, as it is now generally admitted, Kleist himself stood as 
the model of the prince. " Two of the smallest, daintiest hands in 
Dresden," as Kleist relates, crowned him with laurel at a soiree in 
the house of the Austrian ambassador after the preliminary reading 
of the " Zerbrochenen Kruges," ("The Broken Pitcher.") These 
daintiest hands belonged to his beloved Julie Kunze, to whom Dame 
Rumor said he was engaged. Wukadinovic defines quite correctly 
the connection of the drama with its autobiographical meaning: "As 
the poet sees the ideal of love arising next to that of poetic fame, 
so he grants to the ambitious prince, who exhibits so many of his 
own traits, a loving woman standing at his side, who rewards him 
at the close with the wreath." 

The matter goes yet much deeper. The prince says of the 
elector : " Plucks from his neck the chain that's pendant there. . . . 
My soul meanwhile enkindled high." The laurel attains a further 
value for the prince, because the elector binds his own necklace 
about it. The latter is continually taken by Homburg as the father, 
to which a number of verses testify. Since the prince unmistakably 
stands for the poet, it cannot be denied that Kleist had desired the 
reward not only from the beloved one, but this still more with the 
express concurrence of the father. In the beginning to be sure he 
is repulsed by him, " Naught here for thee, away ! " and later on 
account of his disobedience is even condemned to death. 28 He was 
not only pardoned, however, after he had acknowledged his wrong 
and recognized the father's judgment as correct, but when he be- 
lieved his last hour had struck, he was bedecked with the wreath 
which he desired and on which moreover his elector's chain hangs. 
Still further, the latter, the father himself, extends the laurel to 

28 It is significant to compare here the Consul Brutus, who permitted the 
execution of his sons. 



102 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

Natalie and leads the beloved to him. It is beyond question that 
love is the chief motive of the moon walking of the prince von 
Homburg, love to a woman as well as a homosexual tendency other- 
wise authenticated in the case of Kleist. Only it appears here 
closely amalgamated with desire for fame, something completely 
unerotic, and with the sexual, as we have found it so far regularly 
in night wandering and moon walking, quite excluded. 

We will attempt to get more light on the last two points. The 
striving after poetic fame does not remain with our poet within the 
usual, normal limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic 
charactertistic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von 
Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, 
Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered 
this audacious sentiment, " I will rend the crown from his brow ! " 
Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest 
onslaughts, he rushes away to die upon the battlefield. He writes 
to his sister, however, " Heaven denies me fame, the greatest of 
earthly possessions; I fling back to it all else like a self willed 
child ! " 

What lay in truth behind that unattainable goal that Kleist tried 
again and again to carry by force? He himself confesses that it 
was not the highest poetic art or at least not exclusively so. Other- 
wise Kleist would have been able to content himself with his so 
commanding talent and with that which he was able to accomplish 
with it, like so many other great poets. Let us not forget that he 
sought to outdo especially the three greatest. Therefore I think, 
in accordance with all my psychoanalytic experience, that Sophocles, 
Shakespeare and Goethe are together only father incarnations, that 
Kleist thus wanted to remove the father from the field. One has a 
right to definite surmisings on the basis of various works of Kleist, 
although nothing is known to us of the poet's relations to his 
parents. The incest motive is one of the chief determining factors 
of artistic creation, as Rank has outlined in his beautiful book. 29 
It is in the first place the desired and striven for incest with the 
mother herself, in the way of which the father naturally stands. 
The poet realizes in the freer land of poetry what is impossible in 
life, by displacing it over upon a discovered or given material. 

I discussed in a larger work, 30 previous to Rank's book, how 

29 Otto Rank, " Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," 1912, Franz 
Deuticke. 

30 " Heinrich von Kleist. Eine pathographisch-psychologische Studie," 
1910, J. F. Bergmann. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 103 

Heinrich von Kleist made the incest phantasies of his childhood the 
foundation of many poems. So for instance the Marquise von O., 
assaulted in a fainting fit, is protected from the foe pressing upon 
her by some one who loves her and will subsequently surely marry 
her. I need hardly explain that the evil one who will positively 
force himself upon her is the father, from whom the son defends 
the mother, that he may subsequently woo her. It is again only the 
poet himself who sets himself as a youthful ideal god in place of 
the aging father, as Jupiter descended from his throne renewed in 
beauty and youth according to his divine power, to visit Alcmene 
in the form of her spouse Amphitryon. In the " Zerbrochenen 
Krug" (Broken Pitcher) the judge breaks violently into the room 
of the beloved one — a typical symbol for one's own father who is 
also in fact the child's first judge — and is driven out by the rightful 
lover. 

The objection need not be made that the poet has simply held to 
his pattern. The choice of material betrays the purpose, which fre- 
quently remains unconscious. What, we may say, impelled the poet 
although he wished to translate it wholly, to take up Moliere's 
Amphitryon, one of his weakest productions too, and then change 
it in so striking a fashion ? Quite unlike the French version, Jupiter 
becomes for Kleist the advocate with the wife-mother : 

" What I now feel for thee, Alcmene dearest, 
Ah, see ! it soars far, far beyond the sun, 
Which even a husband owes thee. 
Depart, beloved, flee from this thy spouse, 
And choose between us, either him or me. 
I suffer with this shameful interchange, 
The thought to me is all unbearable, 
That this vain fellow's been received by thee, 
Whose cold heart thinks he holds a right o'er thee. 
Oh ! might I now to thee, my sweetest light, 
A being of another sort appear, 
Thy conqueror since the art to conquer thee 
Was taught me by the mighty gods." 

In truth Kleist, like every other poet, chose the most of his material 
in accordance with unconscious wishes, where beyond all else the 
mother complex presses for poetic expression. 

Let us apply once more that which has been so far discovered 
to the "Prinz von Homburg." This is rendered yet more easy 
from the fact that the electress is repeatedly designated by the hero 
as "Mother." His real mother had indeed at her death delivered 

8 



104 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

him over to the friend of her youth with the words : " Be a mother 
to him when I am no longer here." And the electress had answered 
in similar strain, " He shall be mine as if my own in birth ! " But 
since on the other hand Natalie also addresses her repeatedly as 
Mother as she does the elector as Father, so Natalie is Kleist's be- 
loved sister in disguise. The poet would desire the laurel wreath 
thus from his own sister. Why then the father's acquiescence? If 
we now appeal to our psychoanalytic experience, this teaches us 
that regularly the sister incest represents a later form of the older 
and more serious mother incest. The boy, who first desires the 
mother, satisfies himself later with the less forbidden and more 
easily accessible sister. All poets follow very significantly this 
psychoanalytically established relationship, as Rank 31 has recently 
convincingly shown. The poets often represent this,- that the 
phantasies and wishes are displaced from the mother to the sister 
or they are split up between mother and sister, which then makes 
their origin especially clear. 

The latter is also the case with Kleist in the " Prinz von Hom- 
burg." He takes for the mother he desires, at one time the elec- 
tress, at another time Natalie, " his girl, his bride." 32 It agrees 
strikingly also that the prince in the fear of death expects to be 
saved only by the electress, that is the mother, from the punishment 
with which the elector father threatens him. So a child who knows 
no way out for himself, no help any more, flees to his mother. Such 
an unusual, shocking fear of death on the part of a field officer 
needs explanation. It is nothing else than the child's fear in face of 
the stern parent. It is further overdetermined in an infantile way. 
In the drama the prince for a long time does not believe in the grim 
seriousness of his position. The elector father will only put him to 
the test. The sudden transition to frantic fear follows first when 
the friend informs him that Natalie has sent back the addresses 
carried by the ambassador, because she is betrothed to the latter. 
This would have so roused the elector against him. From this time 
on the prince — and the poet — holds everything as possible and is 
ready to sacrifice even the hand of the beloved for his life. 

A second determination likewise is not wanting, which is also 
infantile. Freud has shown in the "Interpretation of Dreams" 

31 L. c. 

32 It is now plainly understood that the prince can name among the dear 
ones who appear to him the elector and the electress. that is his mother, but 
not the third, who is merely a split-off from the latter, at bottom identical 
with her. 






SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 105 

that the child does not at all connect the ideas of older people with 
the words " death " and " to die." He knows neither the terror nor 
the shuddering fear of the eternal nothingness. To be dead means 
to him merely to be away, gone away, no longer to be disturbed in his 
wishes. For his slight experience has already taught him one thing, 
dead people, as perhaps the grandparents, do not come back. From 
this it is only a step that the child sometimes wishes death to his 
father, when the latter disturbs him. Psychoanalysis tells us that 
this is not perhaps a shocking exception but a matter of everyday 
occurrence. Such thoughts are touched upon in the "Prinz von 
Homburg." The false report has come that the elector father has 
been shot and Natalie laments, "Who will protect us from this 
world of foes ? " Then is the prince ready on the spot to offer his 
hand to the orphaned girl, also apparently to her mother. A child 
wish comes to fulfilment, the setting aside of the father who inter- 
feres with his plans for the mother. When the man believed to be 
dead nevertheless returns, he pronounces, as we can understand, 
the sentence of death upon his treacherous son. Only when the 
latter had acknowledged the justice of the sentence — I might almost 
has said, after he had asked forgiveness, is he not only pardoned 
but more than that recompensed, while now the father voluntarily 
grants him his wish. 

It seems to me significant that Kleist freely introduced into his 
drama the complete condemnation to death as well as night wan- 
dering and moon walking. In the first point he had turned tradition 
quite to its opposite. In the original the great Friedrich relates that 
on the triumphant battle field the elector has already forgiven the 
prince that he had so lightly risked the welfare of the whole state : 
"If I had judged you according to the stern martial law, you would 
have forfeited your life. But God forbid that I should sully the 
brightness of this day by shedding the blood of a prince, who was 
once the foremost instrument of my victory." Personal reasons, 
and, as we know from psychoanalysis, these are always infantile 
reasons, must have been involved when Kleist incorporated this 
directly into his poetry and yet in so striking a fashion. Some of 
these reasons I have been able to set forth above. 

It is now clear that the apparently asexual desire for fame does 
not lack its erotic foundation. The desire for fame is so greatly 
exaggerated in Heinrich von Kleist that he will do no less than tear 
the laurel from Goethe's forehead, because in his infantile attitude 
he hopes through an unheard of poetic activity to supplant the father 



106 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

with the mother. After the shipwreck of his masterpiece, the 
Guiskard material, he longed for death because life had no more 
value for him, but he finds later in the " Prinz von Homburg " a 
happier solution. For not only does the mother herself now crown 
him but does it with the father's affectionate blessing. And the old 
theme of night wandering and moon walking, that is climbing into 
bed with the loved one, finds its place here although in an opposite 
form and under a certain sexual repression. The child does not 
come to the mother but she to him and places the longed for crown 
upon his head even with the concurrence of the father. Also the 
fact that the prince transgresses the elector's commands as the result 
of his moon walking, to which the prince is subject, must somehow, 
at least by analogy, have been created from the poet's own breast. 
Nothing is said about this in regard to Kleist, of whose inner life we 
know so little. Yet his very great interest in noctambulism and 
similar " night sides of the human soul," as well as his exceptional 
understanding of the same, show that he at least must have pos- 
sessed a disposition toward it. It should be emphasized once more 
in conclusion that the moon walking in the " Prinz von Homburg " 
does not lack the infantile sexual root, nor is the corresponding 
erotic purpose wanting, which we have always found, heretofore, to 
come to the loved one without being held responsible. 

" Das Sundkind/' by Ludwig Anzengruber. 

"Das Siindkind" ("The Sin Child") by Anzengruber (in the 
first volume of his "Dorfgange") tells of an apparently non-sexu- 
ally colored wandering by moonlight. There a 45-year-old pitch 
worker, the mother of twelve children, who had all died except the 
narrator, and for three years a widow, had become pregnant with a 
" sin child " whose father no one would acknowledge himself. She 
had always been a discreet woman, and was almost equal to her son 
in her work, although he at thirty years old was at the height of 
his manly strength. She had always been as exemplary in love as 
in her work, a combination, as we know, not rare to find. Having 
matured early she was with her first child at the age of fifteen and 
when she was a widow " the people could not wonder enough how 
long it would be before she showed her age." Not rarely "love" 
suddenly overcame her and even toward her grown son she could 
occasionally make quite " God forbidden " eyes. One might almost 
draw the conclusion from the following circumstance that he also 
was more deeply dependent on the mother than he might acknowl- 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 107 

edge to himself. Left alone with her during her confinement, he 
was not able to look at her but drummed on the window pane and 
became more and more confused although " God knows, there was 
no call for it." Then he turned around with his face burning red 
and said, "You ought to be ashamed, Mother, you ought to be 
ashamed ! " Soon however not only remorse seized him but be 
began to curse at the folk, who see in the infant not his brother but 
only the " child of sin." " Do you think for a moment that I would 
bear a grudge against the little innocent worm? Curse you, anyone 
who would separate the children of one mother from each other!" 
After he had lost the love of his youth in earlier years, he had no 
more interest in women but dwelt with his mother alone on the land 
which belonged to the family. Later Martin toiled early and late 
for the illegitimate child Poldl, as if he were its true father, for 
whom moreover he never might make inquiry. 

When Poldl was perhaps sixteen years old, his mother's health 
began to fail and with her anxiety at approaching death she began 
to be concerned for her soul, which she, according to human custom, 
expressed as care for her illegitimate child. He should dedicate 
himself to the Lord, should become a clergyman, by which he would 
remain spotless. Martin, with keen insight, thought thus, " That is 
indeed the easiest way to get rid of one's own sin, to let some one 
else atone for it" and feared it might go hard with Poldl, hot 
blooded by inheritance, but he had no effect upon the mother, who* 
was supported by the boy's guardian. Poldl also did not permit 
himself simply to be talked of by her, but applied himself ever more- 
deeply to his future sacred calling, especially since all the people of 
the place already paid court to him as if he were even now an or- 
dained clergyman. " Soon he had no other thought than of his 
future holy office and he might stay or go where he would, for 
nothing was for him too good or too bad to remind him of it." " He 
strolled about one entire summer," Martin tells us, "and did not 
condescend to the least bit of work but when I was out with the 
farm hands making hay in the meadows or reaping in the field, it 
very often happened that he rushed unexpectedly out of the bushes 
and began preaching to them. This seemed quite right to the lazy 
folk, they would let their work lie and would stand gathered about 
him and listen devoutly to him and I could not take ill their so ex- 
cessive piety. The mother thought as they did and found that his 
absurd preaching there went straight to her heart." 

We will stop here a moment. What drove Poldl so to the 



108 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

priestly calling, what made him so intent upon it? We might men- 
tion in passing the vanity and the high sense of importance, which 
is created by the desire in the sixteen year old boy after the most 
reverend calling. Yet, though I would in no way undervalue his 
ambition or the satisfaction of a so pleasantly tickled vanity, yet 
decisive and determining these can scarcely be. Strong motives 
must govern in order to explain more completely such an impulsion. 
When Poldl strode over the fields and began to preach, "At that 
time the Lord Jesus spoke to the disciples . . .," then he was indeed 
not far from conceiving himself as the Holy One and his mother as 
the Virgin Mary. Jesus had offered himself for the sins of man, as 
he now for the sin of his mother. According to this it is nothing 
else than his love to the mother which drives him to the sacred 
office, in which it is not to be forgotten that such a love, which leads 
to a thought obsession, is in the light of experience never without 
the erotic. 

This mingling of sensuality and love to the mother, and to an 
older woman who could be his mother, shows itself still more clearly 
two years later, when he has a holiday from the seminary for a few 
days. He finds at home a buxom picture of a woman, a relative on 
a visit, almost twice as old as he, the very essence of cheeriness and 
health. " The boy clung closest to her. In spite of his eighteen 
years he still seemed childish enough and this he turned to account, 
and * played the calf with her,' " to use the excellent word of the 
writer. 

Six years later Poldl was appointed to assist an invalid vicar, 
in whose home a regular vicar's cook kept house with her sixteen 
year old girl, whom she had from the old vicar. In the same year 
Poldl's mother was laid to rest and her son appeared at her fun- 
eral, where the robust peasant girls and maidens pressed themselves 
upon him. But he "withdrew shyly from every one of them and 
gave his hand to no one, as he obligingly might have done. He has 
always before this appeared like milk and blood," thought Martin, 
the anxious one, "now he has an unhealthy look, no color, sunken 
cheeks, and his eyes are deep within, he stares at the ground and 
cannot bear to have a stranger look at him. It does not please me." 

All this is clear and transparent to the physician. In the young 
man now twenty-four years old the inherited blood began to make 
itself felt, and at the same time the cook and her daughter let no 
stimulus be wanting. He suffered under his self restraint, grew 
pale and hollow and because only his actions remained chaste but 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 109 

not his thought, he could no more look freely upon a woman. When 
he now preached in the pulpit, he spoke of the devil as the tempter 
and of all his evil suggestions. He could declare what evil thoughts 
come to a man and in closing he threatened his flock most earnestly 
that the devil would carry them all away together. We know well 
that no sins are more condemned than those which one holds him- 
self capable of committing or which one would himself most gladly 
commit if only one dared. 

The young priest owed it to a great love which he felt for the 
miller's daughter that he kept himself pure at least in body. So 
much the more was the vicar's cook intent upon bringing about his 
downfall through her girl. Then they could again rule at the 
vicarage, since the old vicar's days were numbered, when Poldl 
came into the fat living left vacant. It was at the burial of the old 
priest that Poldl delivered at the grave the funeral oration for the 
dead, and endeavored to lay the good example which the old man had 
given upon the hearts of his flock. As he lifted his eyes once and 
caught those of the miller's Marie-Liese, who was listening so de- 
voutly, not taking her eyes from him, he suddenly remained stuck 
in the midst of his speech and could find his place in the text again 
only with difficulty. Was he not able to maintain before her pure 
glance the fiction of a noble priest, did it come to his consciousness 
that he was wandering in the same paths on which the other had 
been most severely wounded? Something of this the miller's 
daughter seems to have had in mind, for as she later begged his 
pardon for having confused him by staring at him, at the same time 
she advised him not to have anything to do with those at the vic- 
arage. The vicar's daughter, who had stolen up unobserved, shook 
her fist at them both, while her mother drew Poldl later into a 
corner to give vent to her feelings, "You cannot have the miller's 
daughter and do not for a moment believe that she would be willing 
to have you." 

On his death bed in the lesser parish, which he held later, he 
complained to Martin, "I should never have been a priest" — with 
his inherited passionate blood, in spite of his mother's urging and 
his love to her. "Martin, you have no idea how hard it is to run 
caught in a sack; it costs a deal of trouble to keep oneself up- 
right. If one does not twist about one falls into it. The cowl was 
such a sack for me. . . . Brother, I have unwittingly fallen into 
disgrace as a wild beast into a trap, and I am more ashamed of it 
perhaps than the worst sinner of that which he has done deliberately 



110 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

and maliciously. I would not have stayed in the trap, could every- 
thing at first only have remained secret, so that no one would have 
been afraid to extend a clean hand to me, by which I might have 
found myself and might again belong to the world and everything. 
But that the others knew right well and they wanted me for them- 
selves and therefore they have behaved without fear or shame so 
that soon everything was free and open to all Rodenstein from the 
forest house at one end to the mill at the other. From that time on 
I have seen no friendly eye, and the blue, yes, the blue eyes (of the 
miller's daughter) were always turned defiantly away from me. 
And because she was unkind to me she became all at once kind to 
some one whom she formerly could not bear. The folk shook their 
heads and prophesied little good for her. So the time came when I 
must come here to this parish. There lay upon me what- can soon 
crush one to the ground, for peace and honor were squandered and 
those who had won them from me hung like chains upon me and 
the bit of sunshine that I had had in life I had to leave behind in 
Rodenstein. When however there was added to this concern for her 
to whom I owed the bit of happiness, I broke under it and then they 
took me and brought me here and I let myself be brought." 

So had he truly become a child of sin with the feeling of lost 
purity and a great consciousness of guilt upon his soul. And that 
he had not merely squandered his own honor and peace but had also 
dragged the beloved to harm, so that she must have doubts of her 
purity, this does the rest for him and makes him the willing play 
ball of the parish folk. From the first day when he took over his 
new charge, he began to wander in the full moonlight up to the 
ghostly hour of midnight. At the stroke of twelve he went to the 
pulpit, over which a bright moonbeam lay, which also lighted up his 
face as bright as day. With closed eyes he knelt in the pulpit, " his 
folded hands before him on the upholstered border, the head bowed 
upon it as if in quiet prayer to collect himself as usual before the 
sermon. All at once he raised himself, bent forward a little as if 
the pews were full of people and he wished first to look them over, 
then he threw his arms to either side and stood there like one who 
would say, ' Strike me dead, if I have offended you, but I cannot 
do otherwise ! ' He did not say this but in a voice as of one speak- 
ing in a dream he uttered the words, ' I know of nothing ! ' And 
then once more — his hands extended toward heaven and spread 
open, as if he would show everything tu all within or about the 
church — * I know of nothing ! ' Afterward he turned and went." 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING III 

In this classic picture of the brother are some features of a new 
sort. Above all, sexuality appears only incidentally to play a part, 
in so far as it awakens the latent tendency to moon walking. Poldl 
begins to wander at midnight after the miller's daughter is lost to 
him and he is tortured by anxiety for her future. Otherwise he 
does what so frequently is done by the moon walker, he carries out 
the apparently harmless activity of the day as he prays in the church 
before an imaginary audience. At least he truly imitates the formal- 
ities with which prayer begins, though the conclusion does not 
accord with the beginning. It sounds like a justification before the 
folk of Rodenstein, who have taken offence at his action, that 
he stands there in Luther's place as one who cannot do other- 
wise though one strike him dead. At the same time the repeated 
outcry at the end, " I know of nothing, I know of nothing ! " smacks 
not only of a denial that he did not know perhaps why Marie had 
fallen into distress, but suggests the directly infantile. Thus a child 
insists, when it is reproached, that it has done nothing. 

Let us take up again the threads of our narrative. Poldl faded 
day by day under the pressure of his heavy burden of soul. At last 
there remained nothing else for him but to let them write to his 
brother that he lay sick and wished to see him. As Martin entered 
the sickroom Poldl stretched his lean arms toward him, breathed a 
heartfelt cry and began to weep aloud like a child. "You are like 
a father to me, Martin, you are like a father to me!" And from 
time to time he added, " Forgive me ! " Then he stroked Martin's 
rough hands, " the hands which had toiled for his daily bread when 
he was a boy." And now he poured forth his confession. He 
should not have become a priest, then the people of the parish 
would have remained strangers to him and he perhaps would have 
succeeded to the Rodenstein mill. His entire concern centered itself 
about this, that he had not only lost Marie-Liese but was also to 
blame for the overthrow of her happiness. He related to his brother 
how the parish folk had apprehended him, so that he was covered 
with shame, how they all hung about the great bell of Rodenstein 
until finally the miller's daughter turned from him and to another. 
After the confession was made Poldl fell asleep contentedly, yet 
only to wander that very midnight. The invalid was very ill, when 
Martin talked with him again the next day. And suddenly he 
began to speak of the days of his childhood and it was remarkable 
to the brother "how he had remembered the most trivial thing in 
regard to it and it seemed to me as if he himself often wondered at 



112 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

it in the midst of his speech. Bit by bit thus he took up his life and 
we talked together of the time when he ran about the sitting-room 
and the court in his little child's frock, until the time when he went 
to school, to the seminary, to Rodenstein. . . . The sun had set 
when with our prattle we had come to the place where we were, at 
Weissenhofen. ' That's the end,' I said, 'and there remains noth- 
ing else to tell.' — 'Yes, yes,' said my brother reflectively, 'that's 
the end,' and there remains nothing more to tell." Soon he noticed 
how truly Martin had spoken in every respect, for the end had come 
for him now physically. With a blessing on his lips for the newly 
won brother of his heart, he laid himself down to sleep. "It had 
become still as a mouse in the room. After perhaps a quarter of 
an hour I heard him say, 'Yes, yes, were we now together, only 
you must not hold me so tightly to your breast.' With this he threw 
himself suddenly over to the right, drew a deep breath, and it was 
over." 

Let us consider once more the circumstances of the moon walk- 
ing which accompanied this. He begins with this after his removal 
from Rodenstein and from his heart's beloved. There had preceded 
the grief over his wasted honor and his forfeited peace, the pain at 
the loss of the miller's daughter and, which is rather conclusive, the 
torturing regard for her future, which completely paralyzed his will 
power. The latter point is somewhat remarkable. For at bottom it 
was never said that her marriage was unhappy. The people had 
shaken their heads before it, only, and prophesied nothing good. 
When Martin fourteen years after the death of his brother meets 
Marie-Liese at his grave, she has become a handsome woman and 
has been a widow for eight years but is well poised mentally and 
lives for her boy. In Poldl's concern the wish must indeed have 
been father of the thought. If he could not have his treasure, then 
she should not be happy at the side of another man. Yet apparently 
this does not refer alone to the miller's daughter. Psychoanalytic 
experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too 
strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a pres- 
ent, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the 
other and offers first the original actual tonal background. Only 
apparently is the effect too strong, if we measure it merely by the 
actual cause, in truth however the action corresponds to all the 
causes, that is the new added to the old. 

We can say further, if we apply this experience to the poet's 
narrative, Poldl had not merely lost the miller's daughter forever 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 113 

by entangling himself with the vicar's daughter, but far more an- 
other, the one for whom he had entered orders. The mother had 
said to Martin, " There is only one way, one single way by which 
my boy can be saved from ruin and I can obtain peace and forgive- 
ness from my sin." This task, to atone for the mother by a holy 
life, had not prevented him from a passionate love for Marie- 
Liese or from an intrigue with the pastor's daughter, yet, since 
he had on the latter's account lost his purity, something else was 
also laid waste thereby, that which had given peace to him and 
a purpose to his muddled life, the love for his mother. As he tar- 
ried already half in the other world, his last words were, " Yes, yes, 
were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your 
breast." This had the mother in her tenderness done to her little 
boy. We see here the regression to the infantile, to a primitive child 
libido. 

The matter can be followed still further. The walking by 
moonlight itself did not begin, in spite of every predisposing cause, 
until Poldl was connected with the new parish and no longer shared 
the same locality with his beloved. It is not revealed whether the 
pulpit of the Weissenhofen church looked perhaps in the direction 
of Rodenstein or not. It seems to me significant that the pastor's 
daughter crept after Poldl all night long, not perhaps merely the 
first time, as if she suspected his hidden erotic or feared even that 
he might go out toward Rodenstein. He must also every midnight 
establish the fact that, in spite of his sins of the flesh, he considered 
himself still worthy to be a priest. For the same reason he himself 
read the mass every day until near the end. Indeed he read this not 
merely in the daytime but also at midnight when other priests sought 
rest. And by his behavior in sleep walking it was as if he wished 
each time anew to justify himself before his Rodenstein parish, and 
especially before his beloved. The Luther attitude referred to the 
former, " Though you slay me, I cannot do otherwise ! " the out- 
spoken infantile expression, the only words which he actually 
speaks, " I know of nothing ! " is for the latter. Thus a small boy 
protests his innocence when any one faces him with a misdeed. It 
was as if he wanted to go back to his beloved, to Marie-Liese, as if 
to his own mother. 

Again we find libidinous and infantile causes as the starting 
point of moonlight walking and sleep walking. Only the erotic no 
longer appears so openly as with the other poets but receives a cer- 
tain disguise. Yet brother Martin, the philosopher of life, recog- 



114 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

nizes clearly the kernel of the matter : " So I had also to witness the 
end with him, as with so many of my brothers and sisters. But I 
still think today this need not have happened, if the mother had 
permitted him his life as it would have been lived out freely by 
himself. First she should not have counted it so great as sin, for 
otherwise there would have been no pitch worker Poldl in the 
world. Although she thought of it within herself that it was a sin, 
she should have so looked upon it that she could have settled it 
with the Lord God. Ah yes ! he had to go about in the cowl, which 
had become a greater sack than a farmer's jumper and there all the 
sins of others enter, but if no one shall commit one in his own right, 
how would one find shelter for all these? If I had only at 
that time been obstinate about the planning of this thing, I would 
have foreseen the wrong of it and have known that the mother was 
an old woman, and with many conscience grows when reason is 
going to sleep. Faith, honor and peace he would never have squan- 
dered, for the farmer's position does not play with so high a stake. 
Still today the little fellow runs gaily about the yard under my eyes. 
. . . Ah, you poor sin child, how wantonly was the joy of living 
destroyed for you ! " 

" Macbeth/' by Shakespeare. 

As I now undertake the analysis of the case of Lady Macbeth, I 
stand not only before the last but the most difficult portion of my 
work. Here indeed everything sexual and the erotic itself seem to 
be quite excluded ; and my attempt appears to fail in both directions, 
in the sexual as well as in the infantile, to apply to Shakespeare's 
heroine what my psychoanalytically treated cases, as well as all those 
others from literature have furnished. The poet has devoted no 
more than one single scene to this entire sleep walking including 
the grounds for it, and he has said as little of Lady Macbeth's 
childhood as of her sexual erotic life. Our knowledge of Shake- 
speare's life is above all so meager, if we turn from the case to the 
poet himself, that the difficulties tower in our way almost mountain 
high. The reader will in this case, which presents itself so un- 
favorably, have to expect neither that certainty nor even that high 
degree of probability of results, which the earlier examples gave 
us. Here through no fault of mine all aids to interpretation are 
wanting. I should consider it as something accomplished if the 
reader did not say at the close, " The case of Lady Macbeth con- 
tradicts all that has been heretofore discovered," as it will appear at 
first. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 115 

We will begin with the literary source for Macbeth, Holinshed's 
" History of Scotland." 33 Shakespeare confined himself so closely 
to this that he took over accurately, even to the dialogue, whole 
scenes into his tragedy. The deviations are for this reason so much 
the more interesting. In the chronicle Macbeth is simply the 
tyrant. At the very beginning it is said of him, "he would cer- 
tainly have been held as the most worthy of rulers, if his nature 
had not had so strong a tendency to cruelty." His cruelty is fre- 
quently emphasized, both at the bier of the dead Macdowald and 
toward the dwellers in the western isles, who " called him a blood- 
thirsty tyrant and the cruel murderer of those to whom the king's 
grace had granted their lives." Finally also in the camp of the 
Danes when they were overcome "he wrought such havoc upon all 
sides without the least resistance that it was terrible to look upon." 
A change seems however to have taken place in his character when, 
after the murder of Duncan, he had seized the kingdom for him- 
self. " He began to reform the laws and to root out all the irregu- 
larities and abuses in the administration." He freed the land for 
many years from all robbers, guarded most carefully the church and 
clergy, and, to put it briefly, was looked upon as the defender and 
shield of everything blameless. He established also many good 
laws and ruled the kingdom for ten years with the greatest wisdom 
and justice. 

" This apparent equity and zeal for all that is best was however 
merely hypocrisy; he wished only to win the favor of the people. 
Tyrants are always distrustful, they are always afraid that others 
will rob them of their power by the same unrighteous means by 
which they themselves have succeeded. As soon as Macbeth dis- 
covered any plans against himself, he no longer concealed his inten- 
tions but practised and permitted every kind of cruelty." At first 
the words of the three sisters of fate lay always in his thoughts. In 
order to attain to what they had prophesied he was willing to have 
Banquo and his son murdered. Yet the murderers hired for the 
purpose killed only the former while Fleance succeeded in escap- 
ing. " Luck seems to have deserted Macbeth after the murder of 
Banquo. None of his undertakings were successful, every one 
feared for his life and scarcely dared appear before the king. He 
feared every one and every one feared him, so that he was always 
seeking opportunity for the execution of suspected persons. His 

33 I cite this according to " Die Quellen des Shakespeare," by Karl Sim- 
rock, 2d edition, 1870. 



116 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

distrust and his cruelty increased day by day, his bloodthirstiness 
was not to be appeased. . . . He gave himself over recklessly to 
his natural ferocity, oppressed his subjects even to the poorest and 
permitted himself every shameful deed." Shakespeare has repre- 
sented the rest fairly truly according to Holinshed, only that in 
actuality this lasted for seven years, until Macbeth fell at the hands 
of Macduff. 

It is also worthy of note what Holinshed has made the ground 
of the murder of Duncan. There preceded in the chronicle the 
promise of the three witches, further Malcolm's appointment as 
prince of Cumberland and, as a result of this, succession to the 
kingdom. Now Malcolm could "ascend the throne directly after 
his father's death, while in the old laws it was provided that the 
nearest relative would be placed upon the throne, if, at the -death of 
his predecessor, the prince who was called to the succession was 
not yet capable of ruling." This latter had happened to Macbeth, 
Duncan's cousin. "Then began Macbeth, from whom by this ar- 
rangement of the king all hope of the throne was taken, to consider 
the means whereby he could seize the crown by force for himself. 
For he believed that Duncan had done him a great wrong, when he 
named his infant son as successor to his throne and had so an- 
nulled all other claims. Moreover the words of the witches encour- 
aged him to his purpose. But foremost of all his wife, a proud and 
haughty woman, who longed with most burning desire after the 
name of queen, would not desist until she had strengthened him to 
the uttermost in his intention." This last sentence is the chronicler's 
only notice of Lady Macbeth. 

We can now measure what Shakespeare has contributed himself 
to her character as well as to that of her husband. At first the 
absolute cruelty, which with Holinshed was the chief trait of his 
character, is wanting in Macbeth, and therefore ambition is men- 
tioned first. Macbeth becomes the tyrant wading in blood first after 
the murder of Duncan and then more from a necessity to defend 
himself. His own wife characterizes best the earlier hero : 

" Yet I do fear thy nature ; 
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness, 
To catch the nearest way ; Thou would'st be great ; 
Art not without ambition ; but without 
The illness should attend it. What thou would'st highly 
That would'st thou holily, would'st not play false, 
And yet would'st wrongly win : thou'd'st have, great Glamis, 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 117 

That which cries, Thus thou must do, if thou have it; 
And that which rather thou dost fear to do, 
Than wishest should be undone." 

Yet Macbeth at bottom dared not murder the king, he only toyed 
with the thought. He must be instigated from without, if the deed 
is not to be put off until the Greek calends. Lady Macbeth from 
the very beginning feels it her task to strengthen her laggard and 
doubting husband in his ambition. This Shakespeare had already 
found in Holinshed. As the chronicle has pictured it : " Still more 
did his wife urge him on to attack the king, for she was exorbitantly 
ambitious and burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the 
name of queen." 34 While she thus incited her husband, she fulfilled 
yet more the longing of her own heart : 

" Hie thee hither, 
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear; 
And chastise with the valour of my tongue 
All that impedes thee from the golden round." 

She summons herself also to the task, calls the evil spirits of the air 
to her aid and will become a man, since her husband is no man : 

" Come, come, you spirits 
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here ; 
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full 
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, 
Stop up the access and passage to remorse ; 
That no compunctious visitings of nature 
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between 
The effect and it ! Come to my woman's breasts, 
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers ! " 

When Macbeth announces, "Duncan comes here to-night," she 
asks sinisterly, " And when goes hence ? " — Macbeth : " To-morrow 
— as he purposes." — Lady Macbeth: 

" O, never 
Shall sun that morrow see ! 



He that's coming 

Must be provided for; and you shall put 
This night's great business into my despatch; 
Which shall to all our nights and days to come 
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom." 

34 The words of Holinshed's chronicle. 



Il8 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

It may be seen that the really cruel one is here first Lady Mac- 
beth and not her husband. He on the contrary must always torture 
himself with scruples and doubts. He constantly holds before him- 
self the outward results of his deed, brings everything together 
which should protect Duncan from his dagger and can only say in 
regard to the opposite course : 

" I have no spur 
To prick the sides of my intent, but only 
Vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself, 
And falls on the other." 

And he explains to his wife, "We will proceed no further in this 
business." Then must Lady Macbeth rebuke him as a coward, no 
longer trust his love, if he, when time and place so wait upon him, 
retract from his purpose. She lays on the strongest accent, yes, uses 
the " word of fury " : 

" I have given suck ; and know 
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me ; 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, 
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn, as you 
Have done to this." — 

and finally develops the entire plan and promises her assistance, 
before she can persuade her husband to the murder. 

She has stupefied the two chamberlains, upon whom the guilt 
shall be rolled, with spiced wine and drunk herself full of courage 
for the deed, as so many criminals. 

" That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold ; 
What hath quenched them, hath given me fire." 

Then she hears Macbeth within at his gruesome work uttering a 
terrified question, and continues: 

" Alack! I am afraid they have awaked, 
And 'tis not done : — the attempt, and not the deed, 
Confounds us; — Hark! — I laid their daggers ready, 
He could not miss them. — Had he not resembled 
My father as he slept, I had done't." 

Then her husband appears with the daggers. As he looks at his 
bloody hands a cry is wrung from him, "This is a sorry sight." 
Yet the Lady repulses him harshly, "A foolish thought, to say a 
sorry sight." 
Macbeth : 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 119 

"Methought, I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more! 
Macbeth doth murder sleep .... 



And therefore . . . Macbeth shall sleep no more! " 

Lady Macbeth quiets him but he weakens his high courage by 
brooding over the deed. 

"Go, get some water, 

And wash this filthy witness from your hand. — 

Why did you bring these daggers from the place? 

They must lie there. Go, carry them ; and smear 

The sleepy grooms with blood." 

Then however as her husband refuses to look again upon his 
deed Lady Macbeth herself seizes the daggers : 

" The sleeping and the dead 
Are but as pictures ; 'tis the eye of childhood, 
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, 
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal." 

Macbeth (alone) : 

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnardine, 
Making the green one red." 

Lady Macbeth (returning) : 

" My hands are of your colour ; but I shame 

To wear a heart so white 

retire we to our chamber : 

A little water clears us of this deed ; 
How easy is it then ! Your constancy 
Hath left you unattended." 

But the horrid deed has not brought the expected good fortune. 
After Duncan's murder Macbeth finds no rest and no sleep: "To 
be thus, is nothing; But to be safely thus." So he first considers 
removing Banquo and his son. But Lady Macbeth is little content : 

" Nought's had, all's spent, 
Where our desire is got without content ; 
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, 
Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy." 

Then comes her husband. All night he has been so shaken with 
terrible dreams that he would rather be in Duncan's place, "Than 
9 



120 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

on the torture of the mind to lie, In restless ecstasy." Lady Mac- 
beth tries here to comfort him with the only tender impulse in the 
drama : 

"Come on; 

Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; 

Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night." 35 

Macbeth promises to do as she asks and charges her to treat Banquo 
especially with distinction. Nor does he conceal from her what 
now tortures him most, "Dear wife, Thou knowest that Banquo, 
and his Fleance, lives." And immediately the Lady is her old self : 
"But in them nature's copy's not eterne." Though Lady Macbeth 
is represented as at once prepared for a second murder, Macbeth 
has now no more need of her: "Be innocent of the knowledge, 
dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed." 

Yet, although he shrinks back no longer from any sort of evil 
deed, he does so before the horrible pictures of his phantasies, the 
hallucinations of his unconscious. Here is where Shakespeare's 
genius enters. The Macbeth of the Chronicle commits throughout 
all his acts of horror apparently in cold blood. At least nothing to 
the contrary is reported. With Shakespeare on the other hand 
Macbeth, who is represented in the beginning as more ambitious 
than cruel, is pathologically tainted. From his youth on he suf- 
fered from frequent visions, which, for example, caused him to see 
before Duncan's murder an imaginary dagger. This "strange in- 
firmity, which is nothing To those that know me," comes to light 
most vividly on the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the banquet. 
Lady Macbeth must use all her presence of mind to save at least the 
outward appearance. With friendly exhortation, yet with grim 
reproof and scornful word, she attempts to bring her husband to 
himself. In this last scene, when she interposes in Macbeth's be- 
havior, she stands completely at the height. Not until the guests 

35 One notes the emptiness of this passage. She could scarcely have said 
much less, if she wished to comfort him. And yet this passage is always 
quoted by those authors who accept love on the part of Lady Macbeth for 
her husband as the driving motive for her action. Indeed, Friedrich Theodor 
Vischer himself does not shrink from an interpolation and translates the pas- 
sage: Lady Macbeth ("caressingly") — "Come, come, my noble lord, remove 
thy wrinkles, smooth thy gloomy brow, be jovial this evening, well-disposed 
toward thy guests." And although the original English text contains no word 
for "caressingly," yet Vischer gives this commentary: "His wife's answer 
to him must be spoken on the stage with an altogether tender accent. She 
embraces him and strokes his forehead." (Shakespeare — Vortrage, Vol. 2, 
pp. 36, 102.) 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 121 

have departed does she grow slack in her replies. In truth neither 
her husband's resolution to wade on in blood nor his word that 
strange things haunt his brain can draw from her more than the 
response, " You lack the season of all natures, sleep." It seems as 
if she had collapsed exhausted after her tremendous psychical effort. 

Shakespeare has in strange fashion told us nothing of what 
goes on further in her soul, though he overmotivates everything 
else, even devotes whole scenes to this one purpose. We first see 
her again in the last act in the famous sleep walking scene. She 
begins to walk in her sleep, falls ill with it one might well say, just 
on that day when Macbeth goes to war. Her lady in waiting saw 
her from this day on, at night, " rise from her bed, throw her night- 
gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write 
upon it, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed ; yet all 
this while in a most fast sleep." — " A great perturbation in nature ! 
to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watch- 
ing," the evidently keen sighted physician thinks. He soon has the 
opportunity to observe the Lady's sleep walking for himself. She 
comes, in her hand a lighted candle, which at her express command 
must be always burning near her bed. Her eyes are open as she 
walks, but their sense is shut. Then she rubs her hands together 
as if to wash them, which she does according to the statement of 
the lady in waiting, often continuously for a quarter of an hour. 

Now they hear her speaking : " Yet here's a spot. Out damned 
spot! out, I say! — One, two, why, then 'tis time to do't. — Hell is 
murky ! — Fie, my lord ! a soldier, and af ear'd ? What need we fear 
who knows it, when none can call our power to account ? — Yet who 
would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him ? 
— The Thane of Fife had a wife ; Where is she now ? — What, will 
these hands ne'er be clean ? — No more o' that, my lord, no more o' 
that ; you mar all with this starting. — Here's the smell of the blood 
still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. 
Oh ! oh ! oh ! — Wash your hands, put on your nightgown ; look not 
so pale ; — I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried ; he cannot come out 
of his grave. — To bed, to bed ; there's knocking at the gate. Come, 
come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be un- 
done. To bed, to bed, to bed." After such appearances she al- 
ways in fact goes promptly to bed. The physician who observes 
her pronounces his opinion : " This disease is beyond my practice. 
Yet have I known those which have walked in their sleep, who 



122 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

have died holily in their beds." Here however there seems to be 
something different: 

" Foul whisperings are abroad ; unnatural deeds 
Do breed unnatural troubles." 

And then as if he were a psychoanalyst : 

" Infected minds 
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. 
More needs she the divine, than the physician. — 
God, God forgive us all ! Look after her ; 
Remove from her the means of all annoyance, 
And still keep eyes upon her." 

Also he answers Macbeth, who inquires after the condition of the 
patient. 

" Not so sick, my lord, 

As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, 

That keep her from her rest. . . . 

Therein the patient 

Must minister to himself." 

Yet as the king's star declines neither the doctor's foresight nor his 
skill prevents Lady Macbeth, the " diabolical queen " from laying 
hands upon herself. 

This case of sleep walking, if we consider it, seems first to corre- 
spond entirely to the popular view, that the wanderer carries over 
to the nighttime the activities of the day, or to speak more cor- 
rectly, of the most important day of the last month. We saw in the 
first act how she reproaches Macbeth for his cowardice, encourages 
him and controls his actions. Only in two points, very significant 
ones to be sure, does it appear that she has now taken over her hus- 
band's role upon herself; in the disturbance of her sleep and the 
concern for the blood upon her hands. How had she rebuffed Mac- 
beth when he had called out in regard to his bloody hands, "This 
is a sorry sight " ! It was only a foolish thought. " Go get some 
water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand." But Mac- 
beth was not to be shaken, the entire ocean would not suffice. 
Rather would the king's blood, which he had shed, change its green 
to glowing red. Yet when Lady Macbeth completes his work for 
him, she remarks lightly, " My hands are of your color ; but I shame 
To wear a heart so white. ... A little water clears us of this deed." 
In her sleep walking itself she encourages her husband, "Wash 
your hands, put on your nightgown." She seeks however in vain 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 123 

in this very sleep walking to wipe the stains from her hands, they 
smell always of blood and not all the perfumes of Arabia will 
sweeten her hands. Must not the inner meaning of all her sleep 
walking lie exactly in these two points, in which she has so com- 
pletely turned about? 

It must be observed that in the tragedy as in the previously re- 
lated tale of the " Sin Child " the sleep walking does not begin in 
childhood nor in puberty, but in both instances in somewhat more 
mature years, and, what is significant, as an illness, more precisely 
a psychic illness. The sin child fell ill because he had lost his pure 
beloved one, who had taken the place of his mother, the original 
love object of his earliest childhood; and Lady Macbeth, who had 
herself become queen through a murder, falls ill just at that moment 
when her lord must go to the battlefield to defend his life and his 
crown. For not without reason the fate of Macduff's wife, who 
was slain when her husband had gone from her, occurs to her also 
when she, while wandering, speaks of the much blood which Dun- 
can had. Therefore it seems likely, and is in fact generally be- 
lieved, that Lady Macbeth becomes ill because of her anxiety for 
life and kingdom. Only the facts do not strictly agree with this. 
In the first place her husband's campaign is by no means unpromis- 
ing. On the contrary he has heard from the witches that his end 
would be bound with apparently unfulfillable conditions, so unful- 
fillable that the prophecy at once frees him from all fear. 

Having hidden nothing from the " partner of his greatness " he 
would scarcely conceal the promise of the witches, which increased 
his confidence to the uttermost. Besides it cannot be fear and 
anxiety which brings on her night wandering. Another current 
explanation also seems to me to have little ground. As Brandes has 
recently interpreted it, " The sleep walking scene shows in the most 
remarkable fashion how the pricking of an evil conscience, when it 
is dulled by day, is more keen at night and robs the guilty one of 
sleep and health." Now severe pangs of conscience may well dis- 
turb sleep, but they would hardly create sleep walking. Criminals 
are hardly noctambulists. Macbeth himself is an example how far 
stings of conscience and remorse can lead a sensitive man. He has 
no more rest after he has murdered the king and Banquo, yet he 
does not become a sleep walker. There must be another cause here 
which precipitates Lady Macbeth's sleep walking. 

We will first examine the relation of husband and wife to one 
another in order to trace out this mystery. The character of Lady 



124 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

Macbeth has caused many a one in Germany to rack his brains 
since the time of Tieck. Up till that time she passed simply as 
Megaera, as an "arch witch," as Goethe calls her. This opinion 
prevailed not only in Germany but in the English motherland too. 
But this view went against the grain with the German spirit. 
Therefore Ludwig Tieck first looked upon Lady Macbeth as a 
tender, loving wife. From this time on there arose critics and even 
poets, who in the same way wished to wash her clean. I will cite 
the two most important, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Rudolf 
Hans Bartsch. The former, of whom I explained earlier, that he 
did not hesitate to make an interpolation to prove his point, sums 
up his judgment in the following sentences : " It is not ambition 
alone that moves her, but love which would see her lord become 
great" (p. 78). And in a second place, "She loved her husband 
and had sacrificed her conscience more for him than for herself " 
(p. 124). R. H. Bartsch goes much further in his romance, " Elisa- 
beth Kott." Wigram says to the heroine, "Do you not feel how 
she (Lady Macbeth) before everything that she says cannot hitch 
horses enough to carry her slow and immovable lord along?" In 
the sleep walking scene "the utter crushing of this poor, overbur- 
dened heart burst forth in the torture of the dream wandering." At 
the close he pronounces his opinion : " If there is a poor weak woman 
upon earth, so it is this arch enchantress, who loves her husband 
so much that she has in admirable fashion studied all his faults and 
weaknesses that she may cover over the deficiencies with her 
trembling body. Seek the wife in her role ! " 

What truth is there in these viewpoints? The poet himself has 
been dead for three hundred years and has left behind him not a 
syllable concerning Lady Macbeth except in the text of the tragedy. 
Therefore according to my opinion nothing remains but to keep to 
this. At the most we can draw upon Holinshed's chronicle, which 
Shakespeare so frequently followed literally. According to this 
Lady Macbeth was extravagantly ambitious and when she con- 
tinually urged Macbeth to murder Duncan, this was only because 
she "burned with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of 
queen." There is never a syllable of a feeling of love for her hus- 
band, or that she desired the crown only for his sake. This objec- 
tion might be made here, that as Shakespeare has often gone beyond 
his source, as in creating the sleep walking scene without a model 
for it, so he might just as well have given characters to Lady Mac- 
beth of which the source said nothing. Certainly that would be a 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 125 

priori conceivable. Only that must appear clearly from the text 
of the tragedy. Yet what does this say? Carefully as I have read 
its lines, I have not been able to find a single, actual uninterpolated 
word of love from Lady Macbeth. That is of double significance 
from the poet of "Romeo and Juliet." He who could give such 
language to love would not have completely denied it in "Mac- 
beth," if Lady Macbeth was to have been a loving wife. One can 
find everything in her words, warning, entreaty and adjuration, up- 
braidings and threatenings, anger, yes, almost abuse, yet not one 
natural note of love. 

This has a so much harsher effect since her husband approaches 
her usually as an actual lover, or more accurately stated up to the 
murder of Banquo. She is warm only where it concerns the attain- 
ment of her goal; it is her ambition which demands satisfaction. 
She is always to her husband " my dearest partner of my greatness " 
as he once appropriately writes her. It is not to be considered that 
Shakespeare, who always overmotivates his situations, should have 
at the height of his power so obscured from recognition all the love 
impulses, which would have seemed to be decisive for her whole 
character. The truth is simply that Lady Macbeth is no loving wife, 
but merely greedy of fame, as already represented in the Chronicle. 
I suspect that the authors who all the way through see in her the 
loving spouse are expressing their own complexes, their own uncon- 
scious wishes. Such an one as Bartsch for example cannot think 
otherwise of a woman than as unfolding lovingly to the man. 

Lady Macbeth makes upon me, in her relation toward her fre- 
quently wooing husband as it were, the impression of a natura 
frigida, that is a sexually cold woman. If one takes her own fright- 
ful word for it, that she could tear the breast from her own sucking 
child and dash its brains out, then the mother love seems never to 
have been strong within her, but rather whatever feeling she has 
possessed has been changed to passionate ambition. Now psycho- 
analytic experience teaches that when a woman remains sexually 
cold toward a sympathetic and potent man, this goes back to an 
early sealing up of affect with a forbidden, because an incest object. 
Such women have almost always from their tenderest infancy on 
loved father or brother above all and never through all their lives 
freed themselves from this early loved object. Though at puberty 
compelled to cut them off as sexual objects, yet they have held fast 
to them in the unconscious and become incapable of transferring to 
another man. It is possible also in the case of Lady Macbeth to 



126 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

think of such an indissoluble bond. Moreover certain features in the 
sleep walking scene seem to speak directly of a repressed sexual life. 

Lady Macbeth wanders at night, since her husband has left her 
and marital intercourse has been broken off. 36 In her hand is 
a lighted candle, which according to her express command must 
burn near her bed, and only now for the first time, otherwise the 
lady in waiting would not have laid such stress upon the fact. The 
candle in her hand, that is a feature which up till now we have met 
in none of our cases, but which, as a glance into literature teaches 
me, is by no means infrequently found with sleep walkers. It 
can hardly be considered a mere accident that Shakespeare discov- 
ered just this characteristic, which is really atypical. One would 
be much more inclined to suspect in it a secret, hidden meaning. 
Then at once a connection forces itself. We know from the in- 
fantile history of so many people that a tenderly solicitous parent, 
the father or the mother, likes to convince himself or herself, with 
a candle in the hand, that the child is asleep. 37 Then we would 
have on one side a motive for sleep walking in general, that one is 
playing the part of the loving parent, as on the other hand a motive 
for the lighted candle. The latter has however a symbolic sexual 
sense which is quite typical and is repeatedly and regularly found. 
The burning candle always stands for one thing and signifies in 
dreams as in fairy tales, folklore, and sagas without exception the 
same thing, an erect phallus. Now it becomes clear why Lady Mac- 
beth, after her husband had gone to the war, has a lighted candle 
always burning near her bed, and why then she wanders around like 
a ghost with it at night. 

The conclusion of the words she utters during her sleep walking 
contains a second unmistakably sexual relationship. Here she re- 
peats not less than five times the demand upon her husband, " To 
bed," while in the corresponding murder scene (II, 2) it simply 
reads, " Retire we to our chamber ; A little water clears us of this 
deed." The further repetition, " Come, come, come, come, give me 
your hand," sounds again infantile through and through. So one 
speaks to a child, scarcely to an adult. It seems as if she takes the 
father or the mother by the hand and bids them go to bed. One 
recognizes already in this passage that this atypical sleep walking of 
Lady Macbeth also leads naturally into the sexual and the infantile. 

36 This is not without significance as a direct precipitating cause, although 
naturally not the true source of her night wandering. 

37 A second still more important motivation for the nightly visit I will 
discuss later. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 127 

It will not be difficult to determine now toward whom the re- 
pressed, because strongly forbidden, sexual wishes of Lady Mac- 
beth are directed. Who else could it be but her own father, the 
original love object of every little girl; what other person of her 
childhood, who later becomes an unsuitable sexual object, but yet 
hinders for all the future the transference of love over to the hus- 
band? This is the one who summons her to walk in her sleep, the 
lighted candle in her hand. It is quite an everyday experience, 
which holds for everyone, for the well as for every one who later 
becomes ill, that in reality the first love, which bears quite clearly 
features of sense pleasure, belongs to the earliest years of child- 
hood, and that its objects are none other than the child's own parents 
and in the second place the brothers and sisters. Here the polar 
attraction of the sexes holds in the relation of the elder to the 
younger and vice versa, that is the attraction of the man to the 
woman and the woman to the man. It is "a natural tendency," 
says Freud 38 in the " Interpretation of Dreams," " for the father to 
indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of 
the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little 
ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The 
child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member 
of the parental couple who discourages it. . . . Thus the child obeys 
its own sexual impulse, and at the same time reinforces the feeling 
which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the 
parents that corresponds to theirs." 

We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, 
the being in love with the parent of the opposite sex, and then the 
resistance against the one of the same sex. Corresponding to the 
love, every child in the period of innocence wants to "marry" the 
former. I recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between 
him and his little five year old daughter. She began, "I want to 
get married." — " To whom ? " — " To you, Papa." — " I already have 
a wife." — "Then you would have two wives." — "That won't do." 
— " Very well, then I will choose a man who is as nice as you." And 
Freud relates (p. 219), "An eight year old girl of my acquaintance, 
when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the op- 
portunity to proclaim herself her successor. ' Now I shall be 
Mamma ; Charles, do you want some more vegetables ? Have some, 
I beg you,' and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, 

38 Freud : The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill. The 
Macmillan Company, London, New York, 4th edition, p. 218. 



128 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

not yet four years old, . . . says outright: ' Now mother can go 
away ; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.' " 

We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader 
point of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths 
teaches us regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of 
all peoples in their period, identify father with king or emperor. 
Naturally then the father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of 
experience, which is always to be substantiated, can be applied to 
Lady Macbeth and makes her ambition at once transparent to us. I 
affirmed above that her lack of sexual feeling toward her husband 
had its origin in the fact that she had loved her father too much 
and could not therefore free herself from him. Her sexuality had 
transformed itself into ambition and that, the ambition to be queen, 39 
in other words, the father's wife. So could she hold fast, to the 
infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest. The intensity with 
which she pursues the ambition of her life is explained then by the 
glowing intensity of her sexual wishes. 

With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A 
remark of Lady Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to 
the murder of Duncan. " Had he not resembled my father as he 
slept, I had done't." This physical likeness signifies identity of in- 
dividuals, as we know from many analogous examples. The king 
therefore resembles the father because he stands for her parent. 
Still one more point may be well explained from her father com- 
plex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening ambition of Lady 
Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning am- 
bition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile 
bed wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed 
upon the chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we compre- 
hend from another side, with the so frequent identification with 
beloved persons, precisely why the lady wanders at night with a 
candle in her hand. Here again appears plainly the return to the 
infantile erotic. 

Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Mac- 
beth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock 
amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no 
crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must 
gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he 
will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes will 

39 Holinshed's chronicle lays emphasis upon this : " She . . . burned with 
an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen." 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 129 

never be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the 
side of her father. Then her power of endurance gives way until 
her very soul fails utterly. As she says on the occasion of the first 
disappointment after Duncan's death: 

" Nought's had, all's spent, 
Where our desire is got without content; 
Tis safer to be that which we destroy, 
Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy." 

Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, 
now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely 
alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile 
ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the role of father, who 
once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, 
" Come, come, come, come, give me your hand ! ' and bade her go 
to bed. 

Why however does not the ruthless Macbeth live down the mur- 
der of the king as he does in the history ? I believe that we must here 
go still further back than to the Chronicle, even to the creator of 
the tragedy himself. There is a certain important crisis in Shake- 
speare's life, where according to the biography by George Brandes 
" cheerfulness, the very joy of life, was extinguished in his soul. 
Heavy clouds gathered over his horizon, we now do not know just 
what their source. Gnawing griefs and disappointments gathered 
within him. We see his melancholy grow and extend itself ; we 
can observe the changing effects of this melancholy without clearly- 
recognizing its cause. Only we feel this, that the scene of action? 
which he sees with the inner eye of the soul has now become ass 
black as the external scene of which he makes use. A veil of phan- 
tasy has sunk down over both. He writes no more comedies but 
puts a succession of dark tragedies upon the stage, which lately re- 
echoed to the laughter of his Rosalinds and Beatrices." 

This crisis came in the year 1601, when the earl of Essex and 
Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's special patron, were condemned 
to death because of treason against the life of the king. According 
to Brandes the depression over their fate must have been one of the 
original causes for the poet's beginning melancholy. Perhaps the 
death of Shakespeare's father, which followed some months later,, 
made a more lasting impression with all the memories which it re- 
called. The dramas which the poet published about that time, Julius. 
Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth, have a common theme, they all re- 



130 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

volve about a father murder. In "Julius Caesar," Brutus murders 
his fatherly friend, his mother's beloved ("And thou too, my son 
Brutus?"). Hamlet comes to shipwreck in his undertaking to 
avenge upon his uncle the father's murder, because the uncle, as 
Freud explains in his "Interpretation of Dreams," had at bottom 
done nothing else than Hamlet had wished in his childhood but had 
not had the self confidence to carry out. And Macbeth in the last 
analysis is ruined by the king and father murder, the results of 
which he can never overcome. We may consider this theme of the 
father murder, always presented in some new form, in the light of 
its direct precipitating causes, the actual death of Shakespeare's 
father and Southampton's treason against the ruling power of the 
state. It is not difficult to accept that at that time the infantile 
death wishes against his father were newly awakened in our poet 
himself and were then projected externally in a series of powerful 
dramas. 

Perhaps the reader, who has followed me more or less up to this 
point, will stop here indignant : " How could any one maintain that 
a genius like Shakespeare could have wished to murder his father, 
even if only in the phantasies of childhood? I can only reply to 
this apparently justified indignation that the assumption I here make 
concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human 
and is true with every male child. We go for proof to what we 
have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also 
already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite sex, 
the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his 
mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same 
•sex, who may be only justly concerned in his education without 
over indulging him. The child would be most delighted to " marry " 
the tender parent, as we heard above, and therefore feels that the 
other parent stands in the way as a disturbing rival. "If the little 
boy," says Freud in the "Interpretation of Dreams," 40 "is allowed 
to sleep at his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, 
and if after his father's return he must go back to the nursery to a 
person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that 
his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place 
next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father's death is ob- 
viously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child's 
experience has taught him that 'dead' folks, like grandpa, for 
example, are always absent ; they never return." 

40 Freud, /. c, p. 219. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING I3I 

Yet how does the child reach such a depth of depravity as to 
wish his parents dead ? We may answer " that the childish idea of 
1 being dead ' has little else but the words in common with our own. 
The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the 
cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing. . . . Fear of death 
is strange to the child, therefore it plays with the horrible word. 
. . . Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the 
scenes of suffering previous to. dying, the same as ' being gone/ not 
disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish 
the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, 
whether by traveling, estrangement or death. ... If, then, the 
child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every 
restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish 
in the form that the child may die." 41 It may be conjectured, if we 
apply this to Shakespeare, that also this greatest of all dramatists 
repeatedly during his childhood wished his father dead and that 
this appeared in consciousness agitating him afresh at the actual 
decease of the father and impelled him to those dramas which had 
the father murder as their theme. Moreover the father's calling, 
for he was not only a tanner but also a butcher, who stuck animals 
with a knife, may have influenced the form of his death wishes as 
well as of their later reappearancess in the great dramas. 

The evil thoughts against the father in the child psyche by no 
means exclude the fact that at the same time there are present with 
them tender impulses, feelings of warmest love. This is indeed the 
rule according to all experience and can be proved also with Shake- 
speare. This other side of his childish impulse leads for example 
to the powerful ambition which we find as a chief characteristic of 
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as in truth of the poet himself. We 
know that when the latter was a boy his father became bankrupt. 
He had not only lost everything which he himself possessed, his 
wife's dowry and his position as alderman, but was also so deeply 
in debt at this time that he had to guard himself against arrest. 
Once more I let Brandes express it: "The object of Shakespeare's 
desire was not in the first place either the calling of a poet or fame 
as an actor, but wealth and that chiefly as a means for social ad- 
vance. He took very much to heart his father's decline in material 
fortune and official respect. He held passionately from his youth 
up to the purpose to reestablish the name and the position of his 
family. . - . His father had not dared to go along the streets, fear- 

41 Freud, /. c, pp. at 5. 216. 



132 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

ing to be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been 
whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. 
The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations 
should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had 
been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there 
would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. 
There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among 
the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a mem- 
ber of the lesser nobility. ... In the year 1596 his father, ap- 
parently at his instigation and with his support, entered a petition 
at Heralds College for the bestowal of a coat of arms. The grant- 
ing of the coat of arms signified the ceremonial entry into the gen- 
try." The ambition of the small child is to become as great as the 
father, and so later that of the man is to exalt the father himself, 
to make him king. One sees how close and how very personal the 
theme of ambition was to Shakespeare. 

Before I go on to analyze further what the poet has woven into 
his treatment of " Macbeth " from his own purely personal expe- 
rience, we must first consider a technical factor which is common 
to all dramatists. It has been discovered that Shakespeare projected 
his own complexes into his tragedies, complexes which are in no 
way simple, but which show, for example, close to the hatred even 
as great a love as well as other contrary elements. He is fond of 
separating his dramatic projection into two personalities wherever 
his feeling is an ambivalent one, these two forms standing in con- 
trast to one another. He splits his ego into two persons, each of 
which corresponds to only one single emotional impulse. That is a 
discovery which of course was not made for the first time by psycho- 
analysis. Minor, for instance, writes in his book on Schiller : " Only 
in conjunction with Carlos does Posa represent Schiller's whole 
nature, the wild passion of the one is the expression of the sensual 
side, the noble exaltation of the other the stoical side of his nature. 
. . . Schiller has not drawn this figure from external nature; it 
has not come to him from without but he has taken it deep from his 
inner being." Otto Ludwig expresses himself similarly : " Goethe 
often separates a man into two poetic forms, Faust-Mephisto, Cla- 
vigo-Carlos." 

It is plainly to be seen, if we apply our recognition of this fact 
to Shakespeare, that he has projected his ego affect into Macbeth 
as well as his wife, which gives numerous advantages. So far we 
have considered Lady Macbeth merely as a complex dramatic char- 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 1 33 

acter, which she is first of all. Besides this nevertheless she surely 
corresponds to a splitting of Shakespeare's affect, for the poet in- 
corporates in her his instincts for ruthless ambition. He has worked 
over the character already given her by the Chronicle for his own 
exculpation. It was stated previously that Macbeth in the first two 
acts is by no means the bloodthirsty tyrant of Holinshed and really 
stands far behind his wife in ambition. It is as if our poet, who 
plainly stands behind his hero, wished thereby to say, I am not 
capable of a father murder and would surely have put it off or not 
have accomplished it at all, if I had not been compelled by a woman's 
influence. Macbeth will go no further in the affair in spite of all 
favorable outward circumstances, but it is Lady Macbeth who forces 
the deed to completion. The final cause of every father hatred is 
rivalry in regard to the mother and so it was she, represented by 
Lady Macbeth, who in his phantasy would have urged the infantile 
Shakespeare to put his father out of the way. Here branches out 
another path for the sleep walking. We have so far spoken only 
of the father who comes at night to the child, but now Lady Mac- 
beth walking in her sleep, seems also to represent Shakespeare's 
mother, who with the candle in her hand convinces herself that her 
darling child is sleeping soundly. 42 

It need not seem strange that I give a number of interpretations 
apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing, 
There is nothing on earth more complicated than psychic things, 
among which poetic creation belongs. Psychic phenomena are ac- 
cording to all experience never simply built up nor simply grounded 
but always brought together in manifold form. Whoever presses 
deeply into them discovers behind every psychic manifestation with- 
out exception an abundance of relationships and overdeterminations. 
We are accustomed in the natural sciences to simple motivation, on 
the one side cause, on the other effect. In the psychic life it is 
quite otherwise. Only a superficial psychology is satisfied with 
single causes. So manifold a chain of circumstances, those that lie 
near at hand and those more remotely connected, come into play in 

42 Going back into Shakespeare's own life gives further illumination and 
foundation for Lady Macbeth's behavior in the sleep walking scene. The 
reader may already have secretly thought that those little tendernesses on the 
part of ordinary parents hardly enter into consideration in the case of a 
thane's daughter. It may be said in answer to this that Shakespeare often, 
as in the presentation of ancient scenes, put without scruple the environment 
of his own time in place of the historical setting. And according to the above 
he would be quite likely to utilize with Lady Macbeth recollections from the 
Stratford childhood. 



134 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

most, yes, apparently in all cases, that one scarcely has the right to 
assert that a psychic phenomenon has been completely explained. 
Dream analysis at once proves this. One can almost always right- 
fully take it for granted that several, indeed manifold interpreta- 
tions are correct. It is best to think of a stratified structure. In 
the most superficial layer lies the most obvious explanation, in the 
second a somewhat more hidden one, and in yet deeper strata broader 
and more remote relationships and all have their part more or less 
in the manifested phenomenon. This latter is more or less well 
motivated. 

We now turn back to Shakespeare and observe the great depres- 
sion under which he labored just at the time when he created his 
greatest tragedies. Does it seem too presumptuous to conceive that 
one so shaken and dejected psychically should have slept badly and 
even possibly — we know so little of his life — walked in his sleep? 
The poet always hastened to repress 43 whatever personal revelations 

43 Otto Rank in his book, " Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," 
furnishes a beautiful and convincing example of such repression: It comes 
from a second drama based on a king's murder, " Julius Csesar." I quote 
from the author's words : M A heightened significance and at the same time an 
incontrovertible conclusiveness is given to our whole conception and interpre- 
tation of the son relationship of Brutus to Csesar by the circumstance that in 
the historical source, which Shakespeare evidently used and which he followed 
almost word for word, namely in Plutarch, it is shown that Caesar considered 
Brutus his illegitimate son. In this sense Caesar's outcry, which has become 
a catch-word, may be understood, which he may have uttered again and again 
when he saw Brutus pressing upon his body with drawn sword, ' And you 
too my son Brutus?' With Shakespeare the wounded Caesar merely calls 
out, " Et tu Brute ! Then fall, Caesar ! " Shakespeare has set aside this son 
relationship of Brutus to Caesar, though doubtless known to the poet, in his 
working out of the traditional sources. Not only is there deep psychic 
ground for the modifications to which the poet subjects the historical and 
traditional circumstances and characters or the conceptions of his predecessor, 
but also for the omissions from the sources. These originate from the re- 
pressive tendency toward the exposure of impulses which work painfully and 
which are restrained as a result of the repression, and this was doubtless the 
case with Shakespeare in regard to his strongly affective father complex." 
Rank has in the same work demonstrated that this father complex runs 
through all of Shakespeare's dramatic work, from his first work, " Titus 
Andronicus," down to his very last tragedy. I cannot go into detail on this 
important point for my task here is merely to explain Lady Macbeth's sleep 
walking, but any one who is interested may find overwhelming abundance of 
evidence in Rank's book on incest (Chapter 6). It is not only that I have 
introduced Shakespeare's strong father complex here to make comprehensible 
Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but his own chief complex stood affectively in 
the foreground, and was worked out, at the same time, as Macbeth. 



SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING I35 

threatened to press through too plainly, as we know from many- 
proofs. The poverty of motivation quite unusual with Shakespeare, 
just at the critical point of the sleep walking, seems to me to score 
for such a repression. We might perhaps say that the fact that the 
poet has introduced to such slight extent the wandering of Lady 
Macbeth, has given it so little connection with what went before, 
is due simply to this, that all sorts of most personal relationships 
were too much involved to allow him to be more explicit. See 
how Lady Macbeth comforted Macbeth directly after the frightful 
deed, the king and father murder : 

" Consider it not so deeply. 



These deeds must not be thought 
After these ways; so, it will make us mad." 

This must have referred to Shakespeare as much as to his hero. 
Moreover the writing and sealing of the letter at the beginning of 
the sleep walking described by the lady in waiting seems as if Lady 
Macbeth had a secret, a confession to make — in the name of the poet. 
I think also at the end, when the everlasting brooding over her deed 
drives her to suicide, she dies as a substitute for her intellectual 
creator, for his own self punishment. 44 

There remain yet only one or two points to be touched upon and 
explained. No discussion is needed for the fact that an outspoken 
sadistic nature in Lady Macbeth leads her to walk in her sleep, 
indeed, disposes her to it. We can easily understand also that this 
breaks forth just at the moment when her husband sets out, that is, 
translated into the infantile, when Macbeth, or in the deeper layer 
her own father, dies. It is much more necessary to explain why 
immediately after the deed she has no scruples in staining the cham- 
berlains with Duncan's blood and takes the affair so lightly, while 
later she is never rid of the fear of the blood and is always striving 
in vain to wash her hands clean. Here it must be again recalled that 
Lady Macbeth on the one hand represents the actual wife of Mac- 
beth, on the other hand the poet himself and in two epochs of his 
life; Shakespeare first in his unrestrained striving and then when 
he is brought low, shaken in his very depths by the death of his 
father. Murder phantasies toward his father came to him as a boy 
and then as a youth at the beginning of puberty, and yet at neither 

44 1 also recall that it is in fact she who expresses Duncan's character as 
father, " Had he not so resembled my father. . . ." 



I36 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

time was he ill. The more mature man however, borne down 
more heavily by life, met by the actual death of his father, broke 
down under the weight of things. This explains in the last analysis 
the change in the attitude of Lady Macbeth. 

I do not know how far the reader is willing to follow me. Yet 
one thing I believe I have proved, that also in Lady Macbeth's sleep 
walking the erotic is not wanting nor the regression into the infantile. 



CONCLUSION AND RESUME 

If now at the close of this book we bring together all our ma- 
terial, we may with certainty or with the highest probability speak 
of sleep walking and moon walking as follows : 

i. Sleep walking under or without the influence of the moon 
represents a motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the 
dream, the fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the pres- 
ent, behind which however infantile wishes regularly hide. Both 
prove themselves in all the cases analyzed more or less completely 
as of a sexual erotic nature. 

2. Those wishes also which present themselves without disguise 
are mostly of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to 
be that the sleep walker, male or female, would climb into bed with 
the loved object as in childhood, which both the folk and the poet 
well know. The love object need not belong necessarily to the pres- 
ent, it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood. 

3. Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the 
beloved person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer 
garments, or imitates his manner to the life. 

4. Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the 
child pretends to be asleep in order that it may be able, without fear 
of punishment, to experience all sorts of forbidden things, that is of 
a sexual nature, because it cannot be held accountable for that which 
it does " unconsciously, in its sleep." The same motive of not being 
held accountable actuates the adult sleep walker, who will satisfy 
his sexual desires, yet without incurring guilt in so doing. The 
same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs 
mostly in the very deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise 
responsible for it. 

5. The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest 
in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light 
q{ the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit 
a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous 
excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest 
in bed. In accordance with this these phenomena are especially fre- 
quent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, sadists and hysterics 
with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus. 

i37 



138 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING 

6. Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little 
symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy. Yet they are found frequently 
in conjunction with the former. 

7. The influence of the moon in this moon aflectivity is very 
little known, especially in its psychic overdetermination. Yet there 
is little doubt that the moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the 
hand of a beloved parent, who every night came in loving solicitude 
to assure himself or herself of the child's sleep. Nothing so promptly 
wakes the sleep walker as the calling of his name, which accords 
with his being spoken to as a child by the parent. Fixed gazing 
upon the planet also has probably an erotic coloring like the staring 
of the hypnotizer to secure hypnosis. Other psychic overdeter- 
minations appear merely to fit individual cases. It is possible finally 
that there actually exists a special power of attraction in the moon, 
which may expressly force the moon walker out of his bed and 
entice him to longer walks, but on this point we have no scientific 
hypotheses. 

8. Furthermore it seems possible that sleep walking and moon 
walking may be permanently cured through Freud's psychoanalytic 
method.^ 

I know very well that this explanation which I give here, offers 
only the first beginning of an understanding. It will be the task of 
a future, which we hope is not too far distant, to comprehend fully 
these puzzling phenomena. 



INDEX 



"Aebelo," ix, 45 
Alcoholics, 137 

descendants of, 25 
Alcoholism, 1 
Anorexia, hysteric, 76 
Anxiety dreams, 41 
Anzengruber, Ludwig, ix, 106 
Audition, color, 91 

Blood, 3, 15, 17, 20 
Burdach, Karl Friedrich, 35 
" Buschnovelle," 91 
Buttocks, 7 

moon as, 19 

Cataleptic muscular rigidity, 25 
Color audition, 74, 91 
Compulsion, 6 
Compulsive neurotic, 77, 91 
Conception, Immacuate, 62, 73 

unconscious, 62, 73 
Concussion of the brain, 2 
Consciousness, disturbances of, 32 
Contractures, 25 
Convulsion, hysterical, 85, 90 
Convulsions, 25 

muscular, 90 
Convulsive attacks, 2, 7, 25 
Cruelty, 25 

Dream, Function of, x 

relationship between sleep-walk- 
ing and, 21 
Dreams, anxiety, 41 

frightful, 7 

of Gro, 61 

terrifying, 25 
Dysuria psychica, 27 

Eclamptic attacks, 2 
Enuresis nocturna, 2 
pleasure in, 29 



Enuretic, 1 
Epilepsy, iv, 1, 138 
Epileptics, 137 

descendants of, 25 
Eroticism, muscle, 63 

urethral, 2 

vaginal, 3 
Erotic, muscle, 8, 25, 31, 42, 90, 137 

nature, 23 

urethral, 27 
Exhibition, 22 
Exhibitionism, 36 
Exhibitionistic, 70 

Folk belief, 62 

interpretation, 82 

mind, 24 

tale, 81 
Frenssen, Gustav, ix, 63 
Freud, 104, 127, 130, 131 
Freud's psychoanalytic method, 138 

Ganghofer, Ludwig, ix, 40 
Ghostly hour, 27, 81 
Ghosts, belief in, 26 

Hemoptysis, 3, 15, 20 

Holinshed's " History of Scotland," 

115 
Homosexual, 2 
Homosexuality, 20 
Hypnosis, 138 
Hypnotic fixation, 26 

somnambulism, viii, 22 
Hypnotism, love transference in, 26 
Hypnotist, 23 
Hypnotized subject, 23 
Hysteria, viii, 33, 138 
Hysteric, 30 
Hysteric anorexia, 76 



139 



140 



INDEX 



Hysterical cardiac distress, 27 

convulsion, 85, 90 

opisthotonos, 86 

somnambulism, viii 

tendency, 91 
Hysterics, 25, 75, 137 

Immaculate conception, 62, 73 
Infantile causes, 113 

erotic, 71 

regression, 136 

sexuality, 21 
" Interpretation of Dreams," 127, 130, 
131 

" Jorn Uhl," 63 

Kleist, Heinrich von, ix, 46, 97 
Krafft-Ebing, viii, 20, 25 

" Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und 

Traum," 92 
Libido, 22, 

repressed, 10 
Ludwig, Otto, ix, 45, 72, 91 

" Macbeth," 114 
Macbeth, Lady, 114 
" Maria," 72 
Masochistic, sadistic, 7 
Menstruation, 3, 15, 17, 30, 70 
Michaelis, Sophus, ix, 45 
Moonstruck, vii 
Motor activities, 23 

impulse, 70 

overexcitability, 26 

phenomena of dreams, viii, ix 

stimulability, 25 
Mundt, Theodor, 92 
Muscular activity, 31, 70 

convulsions, 90 

excitability, 63, 90 

irritability, heightened, 137 

rigidity, cataleptic, 25 

sense, viii 
Muscle erotic, 8, 25, 27, 31, 42, 90, 137 

eroticism, 63 
Myopia, 77, 91 



Neurotic, compulsive, 77 
Neuroses, 22 
Night wandering, vii 
Noctambulism, vii 
Nosebleed, 30 

Organic disposition, 25 
Orgasm, 2 

Paralysis of arm, 26 

Paralyses, 25 

Pavor nocturnus, 25 

Phantasies, sexual, 17, 19 

Poets, 24, 45 

" Prinz von Homburg, Der," 97 

Psychoanalysis for moon walking, ix 

Puberty, 21, 41, 80, 82 

Rank, Otto, 102, 134 
Regression, 113, 136 
Repressed libido, 10 
Repression, 60 

Sadistic, 20, 25 
Sadistic-masochistic, 2, 7 
Sadism, 8 

blood, 2 
Sadists, 137 
Shakespeare, ix, 114 
Sleep, normal, vii, viii 
Somnambulism, vii, 22 

hysterical and hypnotic, viii 
Somnambulist, 23 
Spirits, belief in, 26 
Splitting of mother complex, 77 
" Siindkind, Das," 106 
Synesthesia, 74, 91 

Talking in sleep, 7, 33 
Tic, 90 

Tieck, Ludwig, ix, 42, 124 
Transference in hypnotism, 26 

Unconscious conception. 62, 73 
Urethral erotic, 
eroticism, 2 

Vaginal eroticism, 3 



Nates, 26 



" Woman in white.'" 26 



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Leading Articles Which Have Appeared in Previous Volumes 

VOL. I. (Beginning November, 1913.) 

The Theory of Psychoanalysis. C. G. Jung. 

Psychoanalysis of Self-Mutilation. L. E. Emerson. 

Blindness as a Wish. T. H. Ames. 

The Technique of Psychoanalysis. S. E. Jelliffe. 

Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales. Riklin. 

Character and the Neuroses. Trigant Burrow. 

The Wildisbush Crucified Saint. Theodore Schroeder. 

The Pragmatic Advantage of Freudo-Analysis. Knight Dunlap. 

Moon Myth in Medicine. William A. White. 

The Sadism of Oscar Wilde's " Salome." Isador H. Coriat. 

Psychoanalysis and Hospitals. L. E. Emerson. 

The Dream as a Simple Wishfulfillment in the Negro. John E. Lind. 

VOL. II. (Beginning January, 1915.) 

The Principles of Pain-Pleasure and Reality. Paul Federn. 

The Unconscious. William A. White. 

A Plea for a Broader Standpoint in Psychoanalysis. Meyer Solomon. 

Contributions to the Pathology of Everyday Life; Their Relation to Abnormal 

Mental Phenomena. Robert Stewart Miller. 
The Integrative Functions of the Nervous System Applied to Some Reactions in 

Human Behavior and their Attending Psychic Functions. Edward J. Kempf. 
A Manic-Depressive Upset Presenting Frank Wish-Realization Construction. 

Ralph Reed. 
Psychoanalytic Parallels. William A. White. 

Role of Sexual Complex in Dementia Praecox. James C. Hassall. 
Psycho-Genetics of Androcratic Evolution. Theodore Schroeder. 
Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences. Otto Rank and Hans 

Sachs. 
Some Studies in the Psychopathology of Acute Dissociation of the Personality. 

Edward J. Kempf. 
Psychoanalysis. Arthur H. Ring. 
A Philosophy for Psychoanalysis. L. E. Emerson. 

VOL. III. (Beginning January, 1916.) 

Symbolism. William A. White. 

The Work of Alfred Adler, Considered with Especial Reference to that of Freud. 

James J. Putnam. 
Art in the Insane. L. Grimberg. 
Retaliation Dreams. Hansell Crenshaw. 
History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. Sigmund Freud. 
Clinical Cases Exhibiting Unconscious Defence Reactions. Francis H. Shockley. 
Processes of Recovery in Schizophrenics. H. Bertschinger. 
Freud and Sociology. Ernest R. Groves. 



The Ontogenetic Against the Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the 

Colored Race. Arrah B. Evarts. 
Discomfiture and Evil Spirits. Elsie Clews Parsons. 
Two Very Definite Wish-Fulfillment Dreams. C. B. Burr. 

VOL. IV. (Beginning January, 1917.) 

Individuality and Introversion. William A. White. 

A Study of a Severe Case of Compulsion Neurosis. H. W. Frink. 

A Summary of Material on the Topical Community of Primitive and Patho- 
logical Symbols (" Archeopathic " Symbols). F. L. Wells. 

A Literary Forerunner of Freud. Helen Williston Brown. 

The Technique of Dream Interpretation. Wilhelm Steckel. 

The Social and Sexual Behavior of Infrahuman Primates with some Comparable 
Facts in Human Behavior. Edw. J. Kempf. 

Pain as a Reaction of Defence. H. B. Moyle. 

Some Statistical Results of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychoneuroses. 
Isador H. Coriat. 

The Role of Animals in the Unconscious. S. E. Jelliffe and L. Brink. 

The Genesis and Meaning of Homosexuality. Trigant Burrow. 

Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Negro. John E. Lind. 

Freudian Elements in the Animism of the Niger Delta. E. R. Groves. 

The Mechanism of Transference. William A. White. 

The Future of Psychoanalysis. Isador H. Coriat. 

Hermaphroditic Dreams. Isador H. Coriat. 

The Psychology of " The Yellow Jacket." E. J. Kempf. 

Heredity and Self-Conceit. Mabel Stevens. 

The Long Handicap. Helen R. Hull. 

VOL. V. (Beginning January, 1918.) 

Analysis of a Case of Manic-Depressive Psychosis Showing well-marked Re- 
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Reactions to Personal Names. C. P. Oberndorf. 

A Study of the Mental Life of the Child. H. von Hug-Hellmuth. 

An Interpretation of Certain Symbolisms. J. J. Putnam. 

Charles Darwin — The Affective Source of His Inspiration and Anxiety Neu- 
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The Origin of the Incest-Awe. Trigant Burrow. 

Compulsion and Freedom: The Fantasy of the Willow Tree. S. E. Jelliffe and 
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A Case of Childhood Conflicts with Prominent Reference to the Urinary Sys- 
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The Hound of Heaven. Thomas Vernon Moore. 

A Lace Creation Revealing an Incest Fantasy. Arrah B. Evarts. 

Nephew and Maternal Uncle: A Motive of Early Literature in the Light of 
Freudian Psychology. Albert K. Weinberg. 

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